





^^ 












,#'• "O.. 'i7^«- .O'' 



'«• }?^*., '.' 















-:l 



"- ./.-^^^^ c<>^.*i'i^.^ /\^^>"^^ 

















'^0 

.4 o^ ., 


















^0 '^^^**-- .^^ 














PRACTICAL AGITATION 



By the Same Author 
Emerson and Other Essays. ^1.25. 
Causes and Consequences. $1.25. 



PRACTICAL 



AGITATION 



JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1900 






TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

ijferarjf of CoRg-res^ 

Office of the 

Register of CopyrightSt 



•^ .-T» -•« /5 -T* 



Copyright, 1900, 
By Charles Scribner's Sons. 






8g(K)J^D OOPY. 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



'Vwev^ A(y. V^ 0.0, 



^ 
> 



DEDICATED 

TO 
OF 

THEODORE BACON 



PREFACE 

This book is an attempt to follow the track 
of personal influence across society. The 
first three chapters are taken up with discus- 
sions of political reform, the fourth chapter 
with contemporary journalism. The results 
of these discussions are then summarized in 
the chapters called " Principles." 

I know that there are as many ways of 
stating the main idea of the book as there 
are minds in the world. That idea is, that 
we can always do more for mankind by fol- 
lowing the good in a straight line than 
we can by making concessions to evil. The 
illusion that it is wise or necessary to sup- 
press our instinctive love of truth comes 
from an imperfect understanding of what that 
instinctive love of truth represents, and of 
^ what damage happens both to ourselves and 

vii 



PREFACE 

to others when we suppress it. The more 
closely we look at the facts, the more serious 
does this damage appear. And on the other 
hand, the more closely we look at the facts, 
the more trifling, inconsequent, and absurd 
do all those reasons appear which strive to 
make us accept, and thereby sanctify and 
preserve, some portion of the conceded evil 
in the world. 

J.J.C. 

New York, February 5, 1900. 



viu 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Election Time i 

II. Between Elections 34 

III. The Masses • 67 

IV. Literature ^3 

V. Principles . . . . . • ... 104 

VI. Principles {continued^ 126 

VII. Conclusion ^35 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 



ELECTION TIME 

It is the ambition of the agitator to use the 
machinery of government to make men more 
unselfish. In so far as he succeeds in this, 
he is creating a living church, the only sort 
of State church that would be entirely at one 
with our system, because it would be merely 
a representation in the formal government of 
a spirit abroad among the people. 

Campaign platforms are merely creeds. " I 
believe in Civil Service Reform " is a way of 
saying ** I do not believe in theft," and the 
phrase was a fragmentary and incomplete 
formulation of the greater truth. It was the 
sign that a movement was beginning among 
the people due to reawakening instinct, re- 
awakening sensibility. It was the forerunner 
of all those changes for the better that have 
been spreading over our administrative gov- 
ernment during the last thirty years. A quiet 
revolution has been going forward under our 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

eyes, recorded step by step. It is only be- 
cause our standards have been going up faster 
than the reforms came in that we beHeve the 
evils are growing worse. Such changes go 
on all the time all over the world, but the 
value and rarity of this one come from its 
unity and coherence. Such a thing might 
happen in Germany or in England, but you 
could not disentangle the forces. 

Thirty years ago politics was thought to 
be no occupation for a gentleman. It was a 
matter of bar-rooms, ballot-box-stuffing, rolls 
of dirty bills. You had as little to do with it 
as possible. You voted your party ticket, 
you paid your taxes. You bribed the ash- 
man and the policeman at your uptown 
house, and the clerk of the court, the inspec- 
tor, the custom-house agent, and the commis- 
sioner of jurors at your office. 

That subtle change of attitude in the 
citizen towards his public duty which is now 
in progress, has in it something of the 
religious. The whole matter becomes com- 
prehensible the moment we cease to think 
of it as politics, and see in it a widespread 
and perfectly natural reaction against an era 
of wickedness. Had our framework of gov- 
ernment afforded no outlet to the force, had 
our ills been irremediably crystallized into 



ELECTION TIME 

formal tyranny, we should perhaps have wit- 
nessed great revivalist upheavals, sacra- 
ments, saints, prophets, prostrations, and 
adoration. As it is, we have seen deadly 
pamphlets, schedules, enactments, docu- 
ments which it required our whole attention 
and our whole time to understand; and 
behind each of them a remorseless inter- 
rogator with a white cravat and a face of 
iron. What motive drives them on } What 
oil fills their lamps.? Who feeds them.? 
These horrid things they bring, these in- 
struments forged by unremitting toil, tech- 
nical, insufferable, — they are the cure. 
With such levers, and with them only, can 
the stones be lifted off the hearts of men. 
They are the alternatives of revolution. 

" Reform " may have a thousand meanings, 
and be used to cover a thousand projects of 
doubtful utility. But with us it has a 
definite meaning. When the foreigner says, 
" Ah, but is your reform the right remedy ? " 
he thinks it is a question of policy, or of 
the incidence of a tax. He supposes there 
is an intellectual question. But with us the 
problem is how to protect an attorney against 
a dishonest judge; how to stop the sheriff 
from stealing a fund, pending the litigation. 

What we want to do, what we are doing, 

3 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

is to get rid of gross malpractices, gross 
theft, gross abuse of public trust. It is 
waste of time to expend learned argument 
on a judge who has been bought. The 
litigants must join forces and get rid of 
that judge before they can talk. Of course 
we know that the real trouble with our poli- 
tics is that these attorneys have themselves 
bribed the judge and share in the division 
of their clients' property. It is to ques- 
tions of this kind that the conscience of the 
country has been drawn. 

There is nothing peculiarly sacred about 
politics, but the history of reform move- 
ments during the last few years furnishes 
such striking and wonderful illustrations of 
human nature that it is worth study. 

A few men have a desire, a hope of im- 
proving some evil. They stagger towards it 
and fall. The impulse is always good. 
The mistakes made are progressive. They 
record the past; they outline the future. If 
you draw an arrow through them, it will 
point north. 

If you arrange the reform movements 
against Tammany Hall in a series, and con- 
sider them minutely, you will find that the 
earlier ones are comparatively corrupt, spo- 
radic, disorganized, ignorant, and short- 

4 



ELECTION TIME 

sighted in purpose. They have steadily 
become more honest, more frequent, more 
coherent, more intelligent and ambitious. 
If you examine any one of them, it would be 
impossible to misplace it in the series. 
Looking more closely, you see the reason. 
The earlier the movement, the more zeal- 
ously do its leaders imitate the methods of 
current politics. Each movement represents 
the philosophy of its era. We have had : 
I. The frankly corrupt era (fighting the devil 
with fire). 2. The compromise era (buying 
reform). 3. The educational era, which be- 
gan two years ago, after Low was defeated, 
when people said they were glad of the move- 
ment, in spite of the defeat. Note this, that 
Low did not lead a lost cause, nor was any 
belief in lost causes at the bottom of his 
movement. But in making the best of his 
defeat, many minds stumbled into philoso- 
phy. And this illustrates the progress of an 
idea. People will accept it as an explanation 
of the past before they will take it as a guide 
to the future. It glimmers before them at a 
moment when they need comfort, and van- 
ishes in the light of a comfortable habit or 
prejudice. This apparition of the educa- 
tional idea flitted across New York and took 
root in many minds. 

5 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

Now the smoky torch of reform has passed 
from hand to hand, and is beginning to 
burn brighter. How could the original 
darkness give forth more than a gleam? 
All progress is experimental. The archi- 
tects discovered by practice that the arch 
would support itself. Their earlier efforts 
were tentative. You can see what notion 
they had in mind, as they very gradually 
learned how to subserve the laws of gravity 
and tension. Each improvement is qualified 
by its author's limitations, but shows a gain 
as toward the immediate past. You are fol- 
lowing the steps of the groping and fumbling 
mind of man, fettered at every point by his 
own conceptions, moving each time towards 
a bolder generalization, each stride forward 
exactly proportionate to the breadth of 
thought on which it is calculated. 

What other method is there.? The men 
who fought the Tweed Ring did what passed 
for "politics" in their day. "Votes must 
be paid for, of course; but let the people 
vote right." 

The philosophy of the Strong movement 
in 1894 showed an advance. "The plunder 
must be divided, of course; but let ^/j have 
it because we are virtuous." 

The Low movement in 1897 appealed to 

6 



ELECTION TIME 

voters on the ground of self-interest. Labor 
had to be conciliated, local politicians of 
the worst sort subsidized; ^150,000 was 
spent, four-fifths of it in ways that did more 
harm than good. But the methods were 
delicate. 

The battle of the standards goes forward 
ceaselessly; but all standards are going up. 
What the half-way reformer calls "politics," 
the idealist calls chicanery; what the ideal- 
ist calls politics, the half-way reformer calls 
Utopia. But in 1871 they are discussing 
whether or not the reformers shall falsify the 
returns; in 1894 they are discussing whether 
or not they shall expose fraud in their own 
camp. 

The men engaged in all these struggles 
are in perfect ignorance that they are really 
leading a religious reaction. They think 
that since they are in politics the doctrines 
of compromise apply. They are drawn into 
politics by conscience, but once there, they 
have only their business training to guide 
them, — a training in the art of subserving 
material interests. Now if a piece of your 
land has an uncertain boundary, you have a 
right to compromise on any theory you like, 
because you own the land. But if you start 
out with the sole and avowed purpose of 

7 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

upholding honesty in politics, and you up- 
hold anything else or subserve any other 
interest whatever, you are a deceiver. When 
you began you did not say " I stand for a 
readjustment of political interests. There 
will be a continuation of many abuses under 
my administration, to be sure; but I hope 
they will not be quite so bad as heretofore. 
I shall not insist on the absolutely unselfish 
conduct of my office. It is not practical." 
If you had said this, you might have got the 
friendly support of a few doctrinaires. But 
you would never have got the support and 
approval of the great public. You would 
not have been elected. And therefore you 
did not say it. Qn the contrary, what our 
reformers do is this: They begin, before 
election, by promising an absolutely pure 
administration. They make proclamations 
of a new era, and after they have secured a 
certain following they proceed to chaffer over 
how much honesty they will demand and 
how much take, as if they were rescuing 
property. 

These men are, then, in their desires a 
part of the future, and in their practices of 
the past. Their desires move society for- 
ward, their practices set it back ; and so we 
have moved forward by jolts, until, like a 

8 



ELECTION TIME 

people emerging from the deep sea, the 
water looks clearer above our heads and we 
, can almost see the sky. 

Every advance has cost great effort. It 
took as much courage for a Mugwump to 
renounce his party allegiance in 1884 as it 
does now for a man to denounce both national 
parties as dens of thieves. It took as much 
hard thinking some years ago for the leaders 
of the Reform Democrats to cut loose from 
Tammany Hall as it does now for the Inde- 
pendent to see that there is in all our poli- 
tics only one machine, held together by all 
the bosses and their heelers, and that the 
whole thing must be attacked at once. 

How gradual has been the process of 
emancipation from intellectual bondage ! 
How inevitably people are limited by the 
terms in which they think ! A generation 
of men has been consumed by the shibboleth 
"reform within the party," — a generation 
of educated and right-minded men, who 
accomplished in their day much good, and 
left the country better than they found it, 
but are floating to-day like hulks in the 
trough of the sea of politics, because all 
their mind and all their energy were ex- 
hausted in discovering certain superficial 
evils and in fighting them. Their analysis 

9 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

of political elements left the deeper causes 
mysterious. They did not see mere human 
nature. They still treated Republicanism 
and Democracy — empty superstitions — as 
ideas, and they handled with reverence the 
bones of bogus saints, and the whole appa- 
ratus of clap-trap by which they had been 
governed. 

And yet it is owing to the activity of 
these men that the deeper political condi- 
tions became visible. Men cannot transcend 
their own analysis and see themselves under 
the microscope. The work we do trans- 
forms us into social factors. We are a part 
of the changes we bring in. Before we 
know it, we ourselves are the problem. 

The Mugwumps revolt and defeat Blaine. 
They strengthen the Democratic party. 
They again revolt and defeat Bryan, and 
strengthen the Republican party. So in 
the little towns all over the country, on 
local issues the Democrats are put out for 
being dishonest, or the Republicans are put 
out for being dishonest. Through this pro- 
cess the younger generation has been led to 
note one fact : both parties are dishonest. 
"Ah! but," says the parent, "I am a good 
Democrat. My party is not dishonest all 
the time. It needs discipline." It is too 

lO 



ELECTION TIME 

late: the young man hates both parties 
equally. He now looks at his father, and 
sees in him a sample of corrupted intelli- 
gence, a man able to repeat meaningless 
phrases, and he draws hope from the con- 
clusion. It was natural that the father 
should have been boss-ridden all his' life, 
because he could be whistled back to sup- 
port iniquity by an appeal to party loyalty. 
He belonged to a race that had lost the 
power of political initiative. They could 
not act alone. They must daub themselves 
with party names or they would catch cold. 
They had not the stomach to be merely 
men. 

Thirty years ago one-half of society 
thought that every Democrat was a rebel 
and a scoundrel. The world to that society 
was composed of two classes, — Republi- 
cans (righteous men). Democrats (villains). 
Twenty years of an almost steady growth 
in the power of self-government or of what 
the Germans would call civic consciousness, 
has barely sufficed to strike off the adjec- 
tives, but it has left mankind still divided, 
as before. 

Meanwhile there has emerged a group of 
men who see the whole problem in a much 
simpler light. These men have carried 

II 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

forward the analysis which their fathers, or 
let us say their elder brothers, had begun, 
to such a point that there are no words in it 
which are meaningless, no factors which are 
not reduced to terms of human nature. 
They did nothing but add the last link to a 
chain of logic. Their predecessors discov- 
ered The Machine, and spent their lives in 
trying to belong to a party without strength- 
ening its Machine. These latter men dis- 
covered that both parties were ruled by the 
same Machine. They see one issue, and 
only one issue in American politics, namely, 
the attack on that Machine. 

Moreover, these men have political initia- 
tive; that is to say, they contemplate creat- 
ing conditions, and not merely making 
transient use of visible conditions. Their 
idea is so simple that any one whose mind is 
not warped by the cant of party politics 
understands it at once. 

"All this political corruption is a unity. 
Vote against it and you will beat it. Vote 
for any part of it and you strengthen it.'" 
This sounds simple. But in practice the 
prejudices, the interests, the passions and 
political temperament of the whole popula- 
tion are against it. Every argument that 
the people understand is against this course. 

12 



ELECTION TIME 

Everything that either party fears or hates in 
the other party is passionately pointed out 
as a reason against independent voting. Ac- 
cording to RepubHcans, independent vot- 
ing involves *' allowing Croker to extend his 
rule over the entire State,'* and " enabling 
Tammany Hall to control the judiciary," and 
** endangering the cause of sound money." 
According to Democrats, it involves the 
encouraging of Trusts, Tariffs, Pensions, Ex- 
pansion and foreign conquest. According to 
both Democrats and Republicans, independ- 
ent voting is " voting in the air," and is at odds 
with the spirit of our institutions, which con- 
template two parties and no more. And, 
finally, every one condemns the independent 
because he violates that thumb rule which 
slovenly thinkers regard as a summary of 
all political philosophy, " Between two evils 
choose the least." 

Now the answer to all these arguments is 
that they are the merest mirage. It makes 
no difference which of the two evils, Piatt or 
Croker, has the name of ruling the State. At 
present they divide the rule between them. 
They can do no more. There is no argu- 
ment that can be used against Tammany 
Hall which is powerful enough to make the 
Republican Ring trustworthy. There is no 

13 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

argument against Expansion so excessively 
convincing that it changes the moral charac- 
ter of the Democratic Party. These learned 
arguments are useless, ludicrous, pathetic, 
irrational, impotent, contemptible. They 
do but distract us from the real issue — 
which is personal corruption. Where shall 
a man cast his vote against it.? If I turn out 
McKinley because he bleeds the natives, I 
put in a Democrat to bleed the natives. If 
the whitewashing of Alger arouses public 
indignation, Tammany Hall feeds at the 
trough. If Croker's control of the judiciary 
arouses popular indignation, Piatt's pigs 
feed at the trough. As for sound money, we 
have already elected one Congress on the 
issue in 1895, just as in 1892 we elected a 
Congress on the tariff issue. What was 
done.? Why, in each case that was done 
which the ring wanted done, — nothing. 

Which national party stands for an idea 
to-day.? The only shadow of reason for 
believing that either does, is that the Re- 
publicans cried sound money and won. 
They have done nothing. Had Bryan won, 
he would have done nothing, could have 
done nothing. 

There are no issues in American politics 
save this one issue of common honesty. 

14 



ELECTION TIME 

You cannot throw an issue into this whirl- 
pool of vice, for your issue turns to cash by 
the contact. We need not waste our time 
reading the platforms drawn by Piatt and 
Croker. We must not vote for any man who 
does not go into public life as their enemy, 
because we know that in so far as he is not 
their enemy he is ours. As for these dread- 
ful consequences that are always about to 
follow from a refusal to support one end of 
the iniquity, they do not follow. We have 
the evils now. We are at the worst. The 
powers of darkness may conspire and heap all 
in ruins, but they must not prevent us from 
beginning upon a constructive line to draw 
together and build up the powers of light. 

Nor is there the smallest distinction 
either in the evil or its cure, between the 
case of a village, of a State, or of the whole 
nation. Say you live in a town; you can 
only get a clean school-board by running 
men against both the regular parties. There 
is no other way of getting rid of Hanna and 
the Presidential Syndicate than by running 
an independent candidate for the Presidency. 
No form of Bryanism will oust it, — no rump 
Democracy nor any kind of Democracy. 
Democracy is finished. Republicanism is 
finished. 

15 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

This is the zero point of party loyalty. 
It has been reached very slowly. It means 
open war. The citizen is now confronted 
with a third ticket, which is a deliberate 
insult to both the others. No matter what 
the conditions, it is an appeal which disin- 
tegrates the emotions of the voter. This is 
the very elixir of reform. People are forced 
to think. It hurts them. They cry out 
against those who create the dilemma, but 
they cannot escape it. The vote you poll 
will vary. If the party war-cries are in- 
tense and the party candidates promise 
fairly, very few men will see the point of 
your movement. But no one escapes its 
influence. Let us say that five thousand 
vote your ticket. These are the only men 
whose response is scheduled. But the polit- 
ical vision of five hundred thousand has been 
quickened. No atom of this influence is lost. 
The work was done when the vote was cast. 
Even if it be not counted at all, it will show 
in every political camp in the near future. 

But do you ever have outward, success.'' 
Does the time ever come when the standards 
of every one are so high that the parties 
themselves present candidates as good as 
your own, and there is no excuse for your 
existence } That depends upon the trend of 

i6 



ELECTION TIME 

the age. One thing only is certain, that by 
pursuing this course you are doing all that 
you can do. You are wasting no power. No 
part of your force is helping the enemy. 

After all, the great discovery is a very 
simple thing. We have found, after many 
experiments, that what we really want is, 
not the turning out of officials, not the enact- 
ment of laws, but the raising of the general 
standards. The way to do this is to set up 
a standard. Of course nobody likes to find 
a foot rule laid against his shortage. Even 
the vocabulary of the average man is attacked 
by such a system. Words like "courage," 
" honesty, " " independence, " " pledge, " " loy- 
alty" pass current like clipped coin in the 
language of politics; and the keying up of 
words to their biblical value brings out one 
man a thief and the next a hypocrite. 

All these civic commotions, great and 
small, that surge up and are scatttered, that 
form and reform, the People's Leagues and 
Citizens' Unions, are the altruism of the 
community fighting its way to the surface 
through the obstructions, the snares, and 
the oppressions of the organized world. No 
discouragement sets it back. No betrayal 
destroys it. The people come forward with 
ever new faith. 

2 17 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

What ceaseless endeavor! What patient 
trial of various forms of organization ! We 
live in a society where egoism is so thor- 
oughly organized that there is hardly a 
flicker of faith that cannot be made to heat 
the devil's pot. The dragon stands ready to 
eat up the child as soon as it shall be born. 
You cannot hitch your horse to anything 
vi^ithout helping drag the juggernaut. Be- 
fore you know it, virtue is pocketed. Take 
the most obvious case. The reformers 
imagine they are in politics and must win 
at all costs. One enthusiast calls twenty 
friends into a room and organizes a club — 
and the club ties his hands and sells out to 
the nearest bidder. Before he knows it he 
has been organized back into Tammany Hall. 
You begin with a call to arms and a plan of 
organization. The men come to you in a 
moment of hope, showing every shade of 
intelligence, every stage of opinion, — one 
because he believes in your candidate; one 
because he hates Tammany Hall; one be- 
cause he wants prominence; all because 
they do not expect to be alone. The men 
who volunteer have not a clear notion of 
what they are in for. They thought it was 
a movement to clean the streets. In the 
course of their campaign it develops into 

i8 



ELECTION TIME 

an attack on a bank. They thought it was 
a town movement. Some stage of it affects 
national politics. They thought it was a 
Roosevelt movement. It turns out to in- 
volve hostility to Roosevelt. Your muster 
shows the vague hope of a lot of men who 
are utterly incompetent, undisciplined, 
ignorant. They are merchants, lawyers, 
doctors, professors, clergymen, the respecta- 
bility and intelligence of the town ; and so 
far as self-government goes they are the tat- 
tered children of tyranny. Good God, what 
an army! At the first trumpet they scatter. 
One sells out, one recants, one disappears. 
They are anywhere and nowhere, a ship of 
fools, a barnyard. The execution of the one 
idea for which they were brought together 
has scattered them like sheep. 

Let us take another case. You think that 
what is needed is to raise a standard. You 
call your twenty friends about you. They 
are not corrupt. Nevertheless, let us see 
who they will be. We are not dealing with 
an imaginary community, but with American 
citizens as they exist, with men every one 
of whom trusts his instincts to a different 
extent. Each man believes in principle in 
the abstract, but thinks it is sometimes 
hopeless to be severely virtuous in politics. 

19 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

This " sometimes " is the crtcx. " Is it the 
time? Is this the year? Can you do it this 
way ? " Now, of course, it is always the year. 
It is never hopeless. Absolute honesty is 
always the way. But an age of corruption 
destroys faith. This is the essential injury. 
This is the disease. You yourself have a 
little stronger belief, a little more political 
enterprise than your twenty friends. Other- 
wise it would be they who were summoning 
you to a conference. It is certain that their 
joint wisdom will result in action less radi- 
cal than you believe in. They outvote you 
in council. The standard they set up is not 
absolute. But this outcome will prevent 
you from making your point at all. If you 
are to back your friends up publicly and are 
honest yourself, all you can say will be, 
"Here's a makeshift." Now, the public 
instinct understands this very well already. 
Ten per cent of your own faith you have 
compromised. It has cost you ninety per 
cent of your educational power; for the 
heart of man will respond only to a true 
thing. 

What is it that has led you to compro- 
mise? Why, the age you live in. You your- 
self, being afraid to stand alone, have dipped 
your flag, with the best intentions, because 

20 



ELECTION TIME 

you cannot see that any other course is prac- 
ticable. Yet you yourself can keep your own 
intellectual integrity only at the price of 
destroying your own handiwork. If you do 
not destroy it, you are a hypocrite. Here 
in the room with you were twenty men, the 
very flower of the idealism of the town, not 
chosen by accident, but coming together by 
natural selection. Twenty more like them 
do not exist in the community, for their 
activity would have revealed them. And 
yet there was not found faith enough among 
these to set up an absolute standard. Nay, 
they hang on your arms and prevent you 
from raising one. If you are to do it, you 
must do it alone. Then these men will be 
the first to denounce you ; for your act damns 
them. You can only be true to the public 
conscience by rebuking your friends. If 
you fail to do this, your banner is submerged. 

Let us consider the cause of this weakness 
in Reform organizations. You wish to 
appeal to the people with as good a show of 
names as you can. And so you get a lot of 
well-known men to indorse you. This is 
considered practical. Let us see if it is. 

We are fighting Tammany Hall. But no 
one will for an instant admit that every 
Tammany man is dishonest. The corrup- 

21 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

tion we started out to correct was a cor- 
ruption of the intelligence, a bad habit, a 
defect of vision. The same defect keeps 
Republicans in line for Piatt, because he is 
the Party, a recognized agent of the com- 
munity. The same defect prevents a just 
man from joining a new movement unless 
Banker Jones is leading it. The habit of 
the community is to rely on some one else 
to govern them. No man trusts himself. 
The Machine, upon analysis, turns out to 
be a lack of self-reliance. Wherever you 
see a man who gives some one else's corrup- 
tion, some one else's prejudice as a reason 
for not taking action himself, you see a 
cog in The Machine that governs us. The 
proof of it is that he will dissuade you from 
striking the iniquity. He will explain that 
you can't try it without doing more harm 
than good. You will find that at every point 
of defence, from the arguments of Mr. 
Croker himself to the arguments of some 
sainted college president, the reasons given 
are identical. I cannot find any one who 
defends stealing. They only deprecate 
action as being inexpedient. Now, then, if 
I ask a voter to join my organization, and 
use as a bait an appeal to this very weakness 
- — his reliance upon other men's opinion — 

22 



ELECTION TIME 

can I hope to make much headway? I am 
taking in just so much of Tammany Hall. 
My whole body becomes an adjunct of 
Tammany, in the same sense that Mr. 
Piatt's machine is an adjunct. I am Croker's 
last outpost. I stand there calling myself 
reform, and yet I do not act. Some one 
else must now come forward and try his 
hand. 

This process of ebullition, and thereupon 
stagnation, has happened again and again. I 
suppose there are a dozen extant wrecks of 
reform political organizations in the city. 
Many people have despaired altogether. 
They think it is a law of God that political 
organizations become corrupt in the second 
year. The experience is entirely due to the 
persistent putting of new wine into old 
bottles. In their names and hopes these 
bodies have stood for purity, but in their 
membership they have, even in their incep- 
tion, stood for prejudice. Then, too, the 
bottles bore good labels, and bad wine was 
soon poured into them. A political organi- 
zation is a transferable commodity. You 
could not find a better way of killing virtue 
than by packing it into one of these contrap- 
tions which some gang of thieves is sure to 
find useful. 

23 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

The short lesson that comes out of long 
experience in political agitation is some- 
thing like this : all the motive power in all 
of these movements is the instinct of reli- 
gious feeling. All the obstruction comes 
from attempting to rely on anything else. 
Conciliation is the enemy. It is just as 
impossible to help reform by conciliating 
prejudice as it is by buying votes. Preju- 
dice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you 
is against you. 

What, then, must the enthusiast do in 
the way of organization.-^ Let him go ahead 
and do some particular thing, and ask the 
public to help him do it. He will thus get 
behind him whatever force exists at that 
especial time for that especial purpose. It 
may not be much ; but no amount of letter- 
heads and great seals will increase it. Let 
him abandon written constitutions. Let 
him not be bound by a vote nor seek to bind 
others by a vote. If you have formal pro- 
cedure, you are tied up, for you will then 
have to convert six tailors into apostles be- 
fore you can get at the public. Content 
yourself more modestly. See a friend or two 
and tell them what you intend to do. If they 
won't help you, do it alone. Do not think 
you are wasting your time, even if no one 

24 



ELECTION TIME 

joins you. The prejudice against the indi- 
vidual is part of the evil you are fighting. 
If you keep on in a consistent line of action, 
people will come to you one by one, and 
your group will grow into a sort of centre of 
influence. There will result a unity of 
method as well as of aim, which, as your 
purposes become understood, will enable 
you to act with the speed of thought and 
the force of an avalanche. One great merit 
of this method will be that your whole 
policy will remain an enigma to every one 
except those who really want what you want, 
namely, to raise the general standards. 
Only such men will seek you out. Any one 
else is a danger. Thus your organization 
will grow slowly, but will remain uncap- 
turable, un-get-at-able, an influence, a 
menace, a standard. As fast as adherents 
appear, you can set up centre after centre of 
enlightenment, preparatory to your cam- 
paigns ; debates, pamphlets, correspondence, 
the battery of agitation. And in the mean 
time the benefit done to the workers them- 
selves is worth all the pains. 

By adopting formal machinery you would 
not only organize the wrong people in, but 
you would organize the right people out. 
New York City is full of men whose passion 

25 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

for educating can find no vent in politics, 
because politics are corrupt, and who run 
civic leagues, night-schools, lyceums, and 
people's institutes. They are at work in 
your cause although they call it by different 
names. All this zeal is at your disposal if 
you will only leave your office doors open 
and do something to deserve its support. 
Do not adopt a scheme that excludes these 
men. You cannot impress them into your 
army, but you do not need to impress them, — 
only to know them personally. You cannot 
make them district captains, but they are 
district captains already. 

"But," you say, "are not the votes of 
your twenty friends as valuable as your 
own .'' Whence this egoism ? " It is not 
egoism. I am ready to follow any one who 
wants to do this particular thing, that is, 
make an appeal to absolute unselfishness, at 
no point to conciliate any one. "But this 
is anarchy: every man his own party." On 
the contrary, it is consolidation ; for should 
two men arise, proposing this course, they 
would coalesce at once. 

"But," you say, "who is to do all the 
work.-^ How are you to get men to come 
forward unless you give them tangible, 
formulated doctrines, papers to sign, and 

26 



ELECTION TIME 

words to mumble? " The answer is that the 
men who do the work in reform campaigns 
do not need these things. Literature and 
doctrines you will undoubtedly produce. It 
is not necessary for the effective distribution 
of them, that you should adopt the parade of 
American party discipline. 

Organization, head-quarters, and a distri- 
bution of labor you must develop. But 
you must not have them on paper faster 
than they exist in reality. "But," you say, 
"this is not representative government. 
Where are your convention, your argument, 
your vote, your majority, your loyalty.-* 
Our people must have these things." 

The answer is that, in spite of their views 
on representative government, our people 
still remain human beings. As fast as they 
find themselves spiritually represented by 
some person or body, they follow that influ- 
ence. It is representative government, but 
it represents only the positive and aspiring 
part of the community, — the part which 
never gets represented under your system, 
because that system insists upon alloying it 
with other elements and ruining its power. 
It is educational activity in the purest form. 
By what other means can you speak to the 
whole people at once in the language of 

27 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

action ? By what other means can you 
reach the conscience of the unknown man, 
who has not touched politics for twenty 
years because he could take no part in it, 
because he did not understand it, — the dis- 
franchised, scattered, and dumb men on 
whose voice the future waits? 

Consider what you are trying to do. A 
party under control of a machine is held 
together by an appeal to self-interest. Its 
caucuses, affiliations, resources, methods are 
constructed on that principle. Your body, 
whose aim is to increase the unselfishness and 
intellect of your fellow-citizens, must be held 
together at every point by self-sacrifice. 

If the reform body shall blindly do just 
the opposite of what a party does, it will 
pursue practical politics. The regular party 
is in theory representative of enrolled 
voters. You represent the sentiment of 
undiscovered people. The party appeals to 
old forces and extant conditions. You 
appeal to new feelings and new voters. The 
party offers a gift to every adherent. You 
must offer him nothing but labor. That is 
your protection against traitors. The party 
accords every man the weight of his vote in 
its counsels. You must give him nothing 
but the influence of his mind. 

28 



ELECTION TIME 

"But," you shout, "this is not politics. 
You can never hold men together without 
bonds." The fact is otherwise. There is 
some force at work in this town which, year 
after year, brings forward groups of men who 
proclaim a new dispensation. They are, in 
so far as they have any cohesion, held to- 
gether without bonds now. All formal 
bonds will chain them to the past. For 
electrical force you must adopt electrical 
machinery; for moral force, moral bonds. 
All this political system is the harness for 
the wrong passion. Every scrap of it im- 
prisons your power. The average American 
citizen is slow to see that you can exercise 
political influence without the current 
machinery. This is a part of The Machine 
in his brain. He cannot see the operation 
of law by which virtue always tells. But 
his ignorance does not affect the operation 
of that law, even upon himself. 

This elaborate analysis of just how the 
force of feeling in yourself can best be used 
politically, is, after all, only an instance of 
a general law. The shortest path between 
two points always turns out to be a straight 
line. People who believe in the complexity 
of life, and have theories about crooked 
lines, want something else beside moral 

29 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

influence. They want influence through 
office, or influence toward special ends, or 
influence with particular persons. " Can't 
you see you are destroying your influence? " 
they cry, while every stroke is telling. 
"A thinks you are a lunatic." Praise God. 
"B has withdrawn his subscription." I 
had not hoped for this so soon. " But he 
has joined Piatt." You misstate the case. 
He was always with Piatt, but now he has 
revealed it. These refractory molecules are 
breaking up. See the lines of force begin 
to show a clean cleavage. Ten thousand 
intelligences now see the man for what 
he is. 

At what point in the progress of this 
movement will people begin to see that it is 
practical politics of the most effective kind.? 
Some people see it now. The first people 
to feel the strain are the men whose liveli- 
hood depends on the outcome. The last 
illustration of this was given in Roosevelt's 
campaign against Van Wyck in New York 
State. In this case, as generally happens, 
the real battle was fought in committee 
rooms before the forces were in the field. 
It was the struggle for position. Roosevelt 
was to be Republican candidate for gover- 
nor, and was sure of election. The fight 

30 



ELECTION TIME 

came over the minor offices. Our New 
York form of ballot practically forces a man 
to vote for a "straight" ticket, and half a 
dozen independents put up a complete ticket 
with Roosevelt at the head of it. Their 
purpose was to prevent the Republicans 
from using Roosevelt's military popularity 
to sweep into office a lot of henchmen. 
Within ten days the Republican hench- 
men all over the State were taken with 
convulsions. Every crank of the Machine 
trembled. It turned its awful power upon 
Roosevelt and ordered him to get off the 
Independent ticket. He obeyed and pro- 
tected the henchmen. The episode illus- 
trates the practical power of a few 
independents who can act quickly. The 
panic in the Republican camp was entirely 
justified. If three tickets had remained in 
the field with Roosevelt at the head of two 
of them, thousands of Democrats and thou- 
sands of Republicans would have voted for 
the Reform ticket. The Republican ticket 
would have polled merely the dyed-in-the- 
wool machine Republicans, 

The rumpus among the Republican heelers 
— following so slight a cause as the action 
of five or six citizens who took the field 
with a ticket of their own — resembled the 

31 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

action of a geyser when a cake of soap is 
thrown into it — rumbling — followed by 
terrific vomiting. 

A little practical discipline among the re- 
formers is all that is required to make them 
formidable, — the discipline of experience, 
of acting together, of personal trust. This 
is to be acquired only in the field of action. 

It is encouraging to find how small a body 
of men it takes — even at the present 
moment — to upset the calculations of the 
politicians. The force that made the Re- 
publicans afraid did not lie in the parcel of 
men who threw in the soap. It came from 
the great public. The episode showed that 
the Republicans were afraid to appeal to the 
country. They knew that their cabal was 
almost as much hated as Tammany Hall. 

There is always great difficulty in this 
world as to who shall bell the cat; but con- 
ventions of mice do not further the matter. 
The way to do it is for a parcel of mice to 
take their political lives in their hands and 
proceed to do it. 

The real meaning of all these movements 
will not be perceived till their work has 
been done. As history, the cause and course 
of them will be so plain that a word will 

32 



ELECTION TIME 

suffice to explain them. In the light of 
history it will be clear that the improvement 
in the personnel of our public life was due 
to the demands of the public — expressed in 
citizen's movements. We have already 
reached a point where neither party dares 
appeal to the public — as they did ten years 
ago — on purely party grounds. Roosevelt 
and Van Wyck both claimed to be men supe- 
rior to the average partisan. The advance 
of political thought has already made the 
dullest man perceive the Machine within his 
own party, and every day spreads the news 
that there is only a single machine in all 
our politics. The destruction of this machine 
will not be like the destruction of the mon- 
asteries by Henry VIII. , but it will consist 
in the substitution of new timber for old in 
the parties themselves. 

Any one who looks for an expulsion of 
Tammany Hall like the expulsion of the 
Moors from Spain, will be disappointed. 
There will always be a Tammany Hall. 
But it will be run by respectable men, who 
will look back with wonder and disgust upon 
this period, and who will give the public an 
honest administration because the public 
has demanded it. 



33 



II 

BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

An election is like a flash of lightning at 
midnight. You get an instantaneous pho- 
tograph of what every man is doing. You 
see his real relation toward his government. 
But an election happens only once a year. 
Government goes on day and night. 

It is hard breaking down the popular fal- 
lacy that there is such a thing as "politics," 
governed by peculiar conditions, which must 
be understood and respected ; that the whole 
thing is a mystic avocation, run as a trade 
by high priests and low priests, and is remote 
from our daily life. Our system of party 
government has been developed with the 
aim of keeping the control in the hands of 
professionals. Technicalities have been 
multiplied, and the rules of the game have 
become more and more complex. There 
exists, consequently, an unformulated belief 
that the corruption of politics is something 
by itself. Yet there probably never was a 

34 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

civilization where the mesh of all powers and 
interests was so close. It is like the inter- 
locking of roots in a swamp. Such density 
and cohesion were never seen in any epoch, 
such a mat and tangle of personalities, where 
every man is tied up with the fibres of every 
other. If you take an axe or a saw, and cut 
a clean piece out of it anywhere, you will 
maim every member of society. How idle, 
then, even to think of politics as a subject 
by itself, or of the corruptions of the times 
as localized ! 

Politics gives what the chemists call a 
"mirror," and shows the ingredients in the 
average man's composition. But you must 
take your mind off politics if you want to 
understand America. You must take up 
the lives of individuals and follow them out, 
as they play against each other in counter- 
point. As soon as you do this you will not 
be able to determine where politics begins 
and where it stops. It is all politics: it is 
all social intercourse: it is all business. 
Any square foot of this soil will give you 
the whole fauna and flora of the land. 
Where will you put in your wedge of reform .<* 
There is not a cranny anywhere. The 
mass is like crude copper ore that cannot be 
blasted. It blows out the charge. 

35 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

We think that political agitation must 
show political results. This is like trying 
to alter the shape of a shadow without touch- 
ing its object. The hope is not only mis- 
taken, it is absurd. The results to be 
obtained from reform movements cannot 
show in the political field till they have 
passed through the social world. 

" But, after all, what you want is votes, is 
it not.?" "It would be so encouraging to 
see virtue win, that everybody would vote 
for you thereafter. Why don't you manage 
it somehow.? " This sort of talk is the best 
record of incompetence which corruption 
has imprinted. Enlighten this class and 
you have saved the Republic. Why, my 
friend, you are so lost, you are so much a 
mere product of tyranny that you do not 
know what a vote is. True, we want votes, 
but the votes we want must be cast sponta- 
neously. We do not want them so badly as 
to buy them. A vote is only important 
because it is an opinion. Even a dictator 
cannot force opinions upon his subjects by 
six months of rule; and yet the complaint 
is that decency gets few votes after a year 
of effort by a handful of radicals who are 
despised by the community. We only enter 
the field of politics because we can there get 

36 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

a hearing. The candidates in reform move- 
ments are tools. They are like crowbars 
that break open the mind of the age. They 
cannot be dodged, concealed, or laughed 
away. Every one is aroused from his 
lethargy by seeing a real man walk on the 
scene, amid all the stage properties and 
marionettes of conventional politics. " No 
fair ! '* the people cry. They do not vote for 
him, of course, but they talk about the por- 
tent with a vigor no mere doctrine could call 
forth, and the discussion blossoms at a later 
date into a new public spirit, a new and 
genuine demand for better things. 

It is apparent that between the initial 
political activity of reformers and their ulti- 
mate political accomplishments, there must 
intervene the real agitation, the part that 
does the work, which goes on in the brains 
and souls of individual men, and which can 
only be observed in social life, in manners 
and conversation. 

Now let us take up the steps by which, in 
practical life, the reaction is set going. 
Enter the nearest coterie of radicals and 
listen to the quarrel. Reformers pro- 
verbially disagree, and 'their sects mince 
themselves almost to atoms. ' With us the 
quarrel always arises over the same point. 

37 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

"Can we afford, under these particular cir- 
cumstances, to tell the exact truth ? " I 
have never known a reform movement in 
which this discussion did not rage from 
start to finish, nor have I known one where 
any other point was involved. You are a 
citizens' committee. The parties offer to 
give you half a loaf. Well and good. But 
this is not their main object. They want 
you to call it a whole loaf. They want to 
dissipate your agitation by getting you to 
tell the public that you are satisfied. What 
they hate is the standard. The war between 
you and them is a spiritual game of chess. 
They must get you to say they are right. 
It is their only means of retaining their 
power. 

Thus the apple of discord falls into the 
Reform camp. Half its members take the 
bait. In New York City our politics have 
been so picturesque, the pleas of the politi- 
cian so shallow, the lies demanded from the 
reformers so obvious, that the eternal prin- 
ciples of the situation have been revealed in 
their elemental simplicity. It is just be- 
cause the impulse towards better things 
carries no material content — we do not want 
any particular thing, but we want an im- 
provement in everything — it is just because 

3S 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

the whole movement is purely moral, that 
the same questions always arise. 

We ought not to grieve over the discus- 
sion, over the heart-burn and heated argu- 
ment that start from a knot of radicals and 
run through the community, setting men 
against each other. The quarrel in the 
executive committee of this reform body is 
the initiative of much wholesome life. They 
are no more responsible for it, they can no 
more avoid it, the community can no more 
advance to higher standards before they have 
had it, than a child can skate before it can 
walk. 

The executive committee is discussing 
the schools. In consequence of a recent 
agitation, the politicians have put up a can- 
didate who will give new plumbing, even if 
he does steal the books, and the question is 
whether the School Association shall indorse 
this candidate. If it does, he wins. If it 
does not, both plumbing and books are 
likely to remain the prey of the other party, 
and the Lord knows how bad that is. The 
fight rages in the committee, and some sin- 
cere old gentleman is prophesying typhoid. 

The practical question is : " Do you want 
good plumbing, or do you want the truth ? " 
You cannot have both this year. If the 

39 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

association goes out and tells the public 
exactly what it knows, it will get itself 
laughed at, insult the candidate, and elect 
his opponent. If it tells the truth, it might 
as well run a candidate of its own as a pro- 
test and an advertisement of that truth. It 
can buy good plumbing with a lie, and the 
old gentleman thinks it ought to do so. 
The reformers are going to endorse the can- 
didate, and upon their heads will be visited 
his theft of the books. They have sold out 
the little public confidence they held. Had 
they stood out for another year, under the 
practical regime which they had already 
endured for twenty, and had they devoted 
themselves to augmenting the public inter- 
est in the school question, both parties 
would have offered them plumbing and 
books to allay the excitement. The parties 
might, perhaps, have relaxed their grip on 
the whole school system rather than meet the 
issue. 

But the Association does not understand 
this. It does not, as yet, clearly know its 
own mind. All this procedure, this going 
forward and back, is necessary. The com- 
munity must pass through these experiences 
before it discovers that the shortest road 
to good schools is truth. A few men learn 

40 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

by each turn of the wheel, and these men 
tend to consolidate. They become a sort of 
school of political thought. They see that 
they do not care a whit more about the 
schools than they do about the parks ; that 
the school agitation is a handy way to make 
the citizens take notice of maladministration 
in all departments; that the parties may be 
left to reform themselves, and to choose the 
most telling bid for popular favor; that the 
parties must do this and will do this, in so 
far as the public demands it, and will not 
do it under any other circumstances. 

It is the very greatest folly in the world 
for an agitator to be content with a partial 
success. It destroys his cause. He fades 
instantly. You cannot see him. He is 
become part of the corrupt and contented 
public. His business is to make others 
demand good administration. He must 
never reap, but always sow. Let him leave 
the reaping to others. There will be many 
of them, and their material accomplishments 
will be the same whether he endorses them 
or not. If by chance some party, some 
administration gives him one hundred per 
cent of what he demands, let him acknowl- 
edge it handsomely ; but he need not thank 
them. They did it because they had to, or 

41 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

because their conscience compelled them. 
In neither case was it done for him. 

In other words, reform is an idea that 
must be taken up as a whole. You do not 
want any specific thing. You use every 
issue as a symbol. Let us give up the hope 
of finding any simpler way out of it. Let 
us take up the burden at its heaviest end, 
and acknowledge that nothing but an in- 
crease of personal force in every American 
can change our politics. It is curious that 
this course, which is the shortest cut to the 
millennium, should be met with the reproach 
that it puts off victory. This is entirely 
due to a defect in the imagination of people 
who are dealing with an unfamiliar subject. 
We have to learn its principles. We know 
that what we really want is all of virtue; but 
it seems so unreasonable to claim this, that 
we try to buy it piecemeal, — item, a school- 
house, item, four parks ; and with each gain 
comes a sacrifice of principle, disintegra- 
tion, discouragement. Fools, if you had 
asked for all, you would have had this and 
more. We are defeated by compromise 
because, no matter how much we may de- 
ceive ourselves into thinking that good gov- 
ernment is an aggregate of laws and parks, 
it is not true. Good government is the 

42 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

outcome of private virtue, and virtue is one 
thing, — a unit, a force, a mode of motion. 
It cannot pass through a non-conductor of 
casuistry at any point. Compromise is loss: 
first, because it stops the movement, and 
kills energy; second, because it encourages 
the illusion that the wooden schoolhouse is 
good government. As against this, you 
have the fact that some hundreds of school 
children do get housed six months before 
they would have been housed otherwise. 
But this is like cashing a draft for a thousand 
pounds with a dish of oatmeal.. 

We have, perhaps, followed in the wake of 
some little Reform movement, and it has 
left us with an insight into the relation 
between private opinion and public occur- 
rences. We have really found out two 
things : first, that in order to have better 
government, the talk and private intelligence 
upon which it rests must be going forward 
all the time; and second, that the individual 
conscience, intelligence, or private will is 
always set free by the same process, — to v/it, 
by the telling of truth. The identity be- 
tween public and private life reveals itself the 
instant a man adopts the plan of indiscrimi- 
nate truthtelling. He unmasks batteries and 
discloses wires at every dinner-party; he sees 

43 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

practical politics in every law office, and 
social influence in every convention; and 
wherever he is, he suddenly finds himself, 
by his own will or against it, a centre of 
forces. Let him blurt out his opinion. In- 
stantly there follows a little flash of reality. 
The shams drop, and the lines of human 
influence, the vital currents of energy, are 
disclosed. The only difference between a 
reform movement, so-called, and the private 
act of any man who desires to better condi- 
tions, is that the private man sets one draw- 
ing-room in a ferment by speaking his mind 
or by cutting his friend, and the agitator sets 
ten thousand in a ferment by attacking the 
age. 

As a practical matter, the conduct of 
politics depends upon the dinner-table talk 
of men who are not in politics at all. Gov- 
ernment is carried on from moment to mo- 
ment by the people. The executive is a 
mere hand and arm. For instance, there is a 
public excitement about Civil Service Re- 
form. A law is passed and is being evaded. 
If the governor is to set it up again, he 
must be sustained by the public. They 
must follow and understand the situation 
or the official is helpless. But do we sustain 
him.? We do not. We are half-hearted. 

44 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

To lend power to his hand we shall have to 
be strong men. If we now stood ready to 
denounce him for himself falling short by 
the breadth of a hair of his whole duty, our 
support, when we gave it, would be worth 
having. But we are starchless, and deserve 
a starchless service. 

What did you find out at the last meeting 
of the Library Committee.'* You found out 
that Commissioner Hopkins's nephew was 
in the piano business; hence the commis- 
sioner's views on the music question. Re- 
peat it to the first man you meet in the 
street, and bring it up at the next meeting 
of the committee. You did not think you 
had much influence in town politics, and 
hardly knew how to step in. Yet the town 
seems to have no time for any other subject 
than your attack on the commissioner. From 
this point on you begin to understand con- 
ditions. Every man in town reveals his real 
character, and his real relation to the town 
wickedness and to the universe by the way 
he treats you. You are beginning to get 
near to something real and something inter- 
esting. There is no one in the United 
States, no matter how small a town he lives 
in, or how inconspicuous he or she is, who 
does not have three invitations a week to 

45 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

enter practical politics by such a door as 
this. It makes no difference whether he 
regard himself as a scientific man studying 
phenomena, or a saint purifying society; he 
will become both. There is no way to study 
sociology but this. The books give no hint 
of what the science is like. They are written 
by men who do not know the world, but who 
go about gleaning information instead of 
trying experiments. 

The first discovery we make is that the 
worst enemy of good government is not our 
ignorant foreign voter, but our educated 
domestic railroad president, our prominent 
business man, our leading lawyer. If there 
is any truth in the optimistic belief that our 
standards are now going up, we shall soon 
see proofs of it in our homes. We shall not 
note our increase of virtue so much by see- 
ing more crooks in Sing Sing, as by seeing 
fewer of them in the drawing-rooms. You 
can acquire more knowledge of American 
politics by attacking, in open talk, a political 
lawyer of social standing, than you can in a 
year of study. These backstair men are in 
every Bar Association and every Reform 
Club. They are the agents who supervise 
the details of corruption. They run between 
the capitalist, the boss, and the public ofB- 

46 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

cial. They know as fact what every one 
else knows as inference. They are the 
priestly class of commerce, and correspond 
to the intriguing ecclesiastics in periods of 
church ascendency. Some want money, 
some office, some mere power, others want 
social prominence; and their art is to play 
off interest against interest and advance 
themselves. 

As the president of a social club I have 
a power that I can use against my party 
boss or for him. If he can count upon me 
to serve him at need, it is a gain to him to 
have me establish myself as a reformer. 
The most dependable of these confidence 
men (for they betray nobody, and are uni- 
versally used and trusted) can amass money 
and stand in the forefront of social life; and 
now and then one of them is made an arch- 
bishop or a foreign minister. They are, 
indeed, the figure-heads of the age, the 
essence of all the wickedness and degrada- 
tion of our times. So long as such men 
enjoy public confidence we shall remain as 
we are. They must be deposed in the public 
mind. 

And yet these gentlemen are the weakest 
point in the serried ranks of iniquity. They 
are weak because they have social ambition, 

47 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

and the place to reach them is in their clubs. 
They are the best possible object lessons, 
because everybody knows them. Social 
punishment is the one cruel reality, the one 
terrible weapon, the one judgment against 
which lawyers cannot protect a man. It is 
as silent as theft, and it raises the cry of 
"Stop thief!" like a burglar alarm. 

The general cowardice of this age covers 
itself with the illusion of charity, and asks, 
in the name of Christ, that no one's feelings 
be hurt. But there is not in the New Tes- 
tament any hint that hypocrites are to be 
treated with charity. This class is so in- 
trenched on all sides that the enthusiasts 
cannot touch them. Their elbows are inter- 
locked ; they sit cheek by jowl with virtue. 
They are rich ; they possess the earth. Hov/ 
shall we strike them ? Very easily. They 
are so soft with feeding on politic lies that 
they drop dead if you give them a dose of 
ridicule in a drawing-room. Denunciation 
is well enough, but laughter is the true 
ratsbane for hypocrites. If you set off a 
few jests, the air is changed. The men 
themselves cannot laugh or be laughed at ; 
for nature's revenge has given them masks 
for faces. You may see a whole room full 
of them crack with pain because they can- 

48 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

not laugh. They are angry, and do not 
speak. 

Everybody in America is soft, and hates 
conflict. The cure for this, both in politics 
and social life, is the same, — hardihood. 
Give them raw truth. They think they will 
die. Their friends call you a murderer. 
Four thousand ladies and eighty bank direc- 
tors brought vinegar and brown paper to 
Low when he was attacked, and Roosevelt 
posed as a martyr because it was said, up 
and down, that he acted the part of a selfish 
politician. What humbug! How is it that 
all these things grow on the same root, — 
fraud, cowardice, formality, sentimentalism, 
and a lack of humor.'* Why do people 
become so solemn when they are making a 
deal, and so angry when they are defending 
it? The righteous indignation expended in 
protecting Roosevelt would have founded a 
church. 

The whole problem of better government 
is a question of how to get people to stop 
simpering and saying " After you " to cant. 
A is an aristocrat. B is a boss. C is a 
candidate. D is a distiller. E is an ex- 
cellent citizen. They dine. Gloomy silence 
would be more respectable than this chipper 
concern that all shall go well. Is not this 
4 49 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

politics? Yes, and the very essence of it. 
Is not the exposure of it practical reform ? 
How easily the arrow goes in ! A does not 
think you should confound him with B, nor 
E with C. Each is a reformer when he 
looks to the right, and a scamp as seen from 
the left. What is their fault.? Collusion. 
"But A means so well." They all mean 
well. Let us not confound the gradations 
of their virtue ; but can we call any one an 
honest man who knowingly consorts with 
thieves.-* This they all do. Let us declare 
it. Their resentment at finding themselves 
classed together drives the wedge into the 
clique. 

Remember, too, that there is no such 
thing as abstract truth. You must talk 
facts, you must name names, you must im- 
pute motives. You must say what is in 
your mind. It is the only means you have 
of cutting yourself free from the body of this 
death. Innuendo will not do. Nobody 
minds innuendo. We live and breathe 
nothing else. If you are not strong enough 
to face the issue in private life, do not 
dream that you can do anything for public 
affairs. This, of course, means fight, not 
to-morrow, but now. It is only in the course 
of conflict that any one can come to under- 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

stand the system, the habit of thought, 
the mental condition, out of which all our 
evils arise. The first difficulty is to see the 
evils clearly; and when we do see them it 
is like fighting an atmosphere to contend 
against them. They are so universal and 
omnipresent that you have no terms to name 
them by. You must burn a disinfectant. 

We have observed, thus far, that no ques- 
tion is ever involved in practical agitation 
except truth-telling. So long as a man is 
trying to tell the truth, his remarks will 
contain a margin which other people will 
regard as mystifying and irritating exagger- 
ation. It is this very margin of controversy 
that does the work The more accurate he 
is, the less he exaggerates, the more he will 
excite people. It is only by the true part 
of what is said that the interest is roused. 
No explosion follows a lie. 

The awaking of the better feelings of the 
individual man is not only the immediate 
but the ultimate end of all politics. Nor 
need we be alarmed at any collateral results. 
No one has ever succeeded in drawing any 
valid distinction between positive and nega- 
tive educational work, except this: that in 
so far as a man is positive himself, he does 
positive work. It is necessary to destroy 

51 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

reputations when they are lies. Peace be 
to their ashes. But war and fire until they 
be ashes. This is positive and constructive 
work. You cannot state your case without 
using popular illustrations, and in clearing 
the ground for justice and mercy, some little 
great man gets shown up as a make-believe. 
This is constructive work. 

It is impossible to do harm to reform, 
unless you are taking some course that 
tends to put people to sleep. Strangely 
enough, the great outcry is made upon occa- 
sions when men are refusing to take such a 
course. This is due to the hypnotism of 
self-interest. "Don't wake us up!" they 
cry, " We cannot stand the agony of it ; " 
and the rising energy with which they speak 
wakes other sleepers. In the early stages 
of any new idea the only advertising it gets 
is denunciation. This is so much better 
than silence, that one may hail it as the 
dawn. You must speak till you draw blood. 
The agitators have always understood this. 
Such men as Wendell Phillips were not 
extravagant. They were practical men. 
Their business was to get heard. They 
used vitriol, but they were dealing with the 
hide of the rhinoceros. 

If you look at the work of the anti-slavery 

52 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

people by the light of what they were trying 
to do, you will find that they had a very 
clear understanding of their task. The 
reason of some of them canted a little from 
the strain and stress ; but they were so much 
nearer being right-minded than their con- 
temporaries that we may claim them as 
respectable human beings. They were the 
rock on which the old politics split. They 
were a new force. As soon as they had 
gathered head enough to affect political 
issues, they broke every public man at the 
North by forcing him to take sides. There 
is not a man of the era whom they did not 
shatter. Finally their own leaders got into 
public life, and it was not till then that the 
new era began. The same thing is happen- 
ing to-day. It is the function of the re- 
former to crack up any public man who 
dodges the issue of corruption, or who tries 
to ride two horses by remaining a straight 
party man and shouting reform. This is 
no one's fault. It is a natural process. It 
is fate. Some fail on one side of the line, 
and some on the other. One gets the office, 
and the next loses it; but oblivion yawns for 
all of them. There is no cassia that can 
embalm their deeds ; they can do nothing 
interesting, nothing that it lies in the power 

53 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

of the human mind to remember. Why is 
it that Calhoun's Speeches are unreadable? 
He had the earnestness of a prophet and the 
strength almost of a Titan ; but he was en- 
gaged in framing a philosophy to protect an 
interest. He was maintaining something 
that was not true. It was a fallacy. It was 
a pretence. It was a house built on the 
sands of temporary conditions. Such are 
the ideas of those middling good men, who 
profess honesty in just that degree which 
will keep them in office. Honesty beyond 
this point is, in their philosophy, incom- 
patible with earthly conditions. These 
men must exist at present. They are an 
organic product of the times; they are 
samples of mediocrity. But they have noth- 
ing to offer to the curiosity of the next gen- 
eration. No, not though their talent was 
employed in protecting an Empire — as it is 
now employed in eking out the supremacy 
of a disease in a country whose deeper 
health is beginning to throw the poison off. 

Our public men are confronted with two 
systems of politics. They cannot hedge. 
If the question were suddenly to be lost in 
a riot, no doubt a good administrator might 
win applause, even a Tammany chief. But 
we have no riots. We have finished the war 

54 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

with Spain, and, unless foreign complica- 
tions shall set in, we are about to sit down 
with the politicians over our domestic issue 
— theft. Are you for theft or against it? 
You can't be both; and your conversation, 
the views you hold and express to your 
friends, are the test. It is only because 
politics affect or reflect these views that 
politics have any importance at all. Your 
agents — Croker, Hanna — are serving you 
faithfully now. Nothing else is to be heard 
at the clubs but the sound of little hammers 
riveting abuse. 

There is another side to this shield that 
calls not for scorn but for pity. Have you 
ever been in need of money? Almost every 
man who enters our society joins it as a 
young man in need of money. His instincts 
are unsullied, his intellect is fresh and 
strong, but he must live. How comes it 
that the country is full of maimed human 
beings, of cynics and feeble good men, and 
outside of this no form of life except the 
diabolical intelligence of pure business? 

How to make yourself needed, — it is the 
sycophant's problem; and why should we 
expect a young American to act differently 
from a young Spaniard at the Court of 

55 



PRACTICAL AGITATIOIS] 

Philip the Second? He must get on. He 
goes into a law office, and if he is offended 
at its dishonest practices he cannot speak. 
He soon accepts them. Thereafter he can- 
not see them. He goes into a newspaper 
office, the same; a banker's, a merchant's, a 
dry-goods' shop. What has happened to 
these fellows at the end of three years, that 
their minds seem to be drying up? I have 
seen many men I knew in college grow more 
and more uninteresting from year to year. 
Is there something in trade that desiccates 
and flattens out, that turns men into dried 
leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there 
is. It is not due to trade, but to intensity 
of self-seeking, combined with narrowness 
of occupation. If I had to make my way at 
the court of Queen Elizabeth, I should 
need more kinds of wits and more knowl- 
edge of human nature than in the New York 
button trade. No doubt I should be a pre- 
occupied, cringing, and odious sort of person 
at a feudal festivity ; but I should be a fasci- 
nating man of genius compared to John H. 
Painter, who at the age of thirty is making 
^15,000 a year by keeping his mouth shut 
and attending to business. Put a pressure 
gauge into Painter, and measure the busi- 
ness tension at New York in 1900. He is 

56 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

passing his youth in a trance over a game of 
skill, and thereby earning the respect and 
admiration of all men. Do not blame him. 
The great current of business force that 
passes through the port of New York has 
touched him, and he is rigid. There are 
hundreds of these fellows, and they make us 
think of the well-meaning young man who 
has to support his family, and who must 
compete against them for the confidence of 
his business patrons. Our standard of com- 
mercial honesty is set by that current. It 
is entirely the result of the competition that 
comes from everybody's wanting to do the 
same thing. 

"But," you say, "we are here dealing 
with a natural force. If you like, it withers 
character, and preoccupies one part of a man 
for so long that the rest of him becomes 
numb. He is hard and queer. He cannot 
write because he cannot think; he cannot 
draw because he cannot think; he can- 
not enter real politics because he cannot 
think. He is all the wretch you depict him, 
but we must have him. Such are men." 
This is the biggest folly in the world, and 
shows as deep an intellectual injury in the 
mind that thinks it as self-seeking can 
inflict. Business has destroyed the very 

57 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

knowledge in us of all other natural forces 
except business. 

What shall we do to diminish this awful 
pressure that makes politics a hell, and 
wrings out our manhood, till (you will find) 
the Americans condone the death of their 
brothers and fathers who perished in home 
camps during the Spanish war, because it 
all happened in the cause of trade, it was 
business thrift, done by smart men in pur- 
suance of self-interest? You ask what you 
can do to diminish the tension of selfish- 
ness, which is as cruel as superstition, and 
which is not in one place, but everywhere in 
the United States. It runs a hot iron over 
young intellect, and crushes character in the 
bud. It is blindness, palsy, and hip disease. 
You can hardly find a man who has not got 
some form of it. There is no newspaper 
which does not show signs of it. You can 
hardly find a man who does not proclaim it 
to be the elixir of life, the vade-mecum of 
civilization. What can you do.? Why, you 
can oppose it with other natural forces. 

You yourself cannot turn Niagara; but 
there is not a town in America where one 
single man cannot make his force felt against 
the whole torrent. He takes a stand on a 
practical matter. He takes action against 

58 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

some abuse. What does this accomplish? 
Everything. How many people are there in 
your town ? Well, every one of them gets a 
thrill that strikes deeper than any sermon he 
ever heard. He may howl, but he hears. 
The grocer's boy, for the first time in his 
life, believes that the whole outfit of morality 
has any place in the practical world. Every 
class contributes its comment. Next year a 
new element comes forward in politics, as if 
the franchise had been extended. Remem- 
ber this : you cannot, though you owned the 
world, do any good in it except by devising 
new ways of manifesting the fact that you 
felt in a particular way. It is the personal in- 
fluence of example that is the power. Noth- 
ing else counts. You can do harm by other 
methods, but not good. This influence is a 
natural force, and works like steam power. 
Why all this commotion over your protest? 
If you accuse the mayor of being a thief, 
why does he not reply, in the words of 
modern philosophy, '* Of course I *m a thief, 
I 'm made that way " ? Instead of that he 
resents it, and there ensues a discussion that 
takes people's attention off of trade, and 
qualifies the atmosphere of the place. You 
have appreciably relieved the tension and 
checked the plague. 

59 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

This whole subject must be looked at as a 
crusade in the cause of humanity. You are 
making it easier for every young man in town 
to earn his livelihood without paying out his 
soul and conscience. You cannot help any 
one man. You are forced into helping them 
all at once. Every time a man asserts himself 
he cuts a cord that is strangling somebody. 
The first time that independent candidates 
for local office were run in New York City, 
strong men cried in the street for rage. The 
supremacy of commerce had been affronted. 
New York, in all that makes life worth living, 
is a new city since the reform movements 
began to break up the torpor of serfdom. 

You asked how to fight force. It must be 
fought with force, and not with arguments. 
Indeed, it is easier to start a reform and carry 
it through, than it is to explain either why or 
how it is done. You can only understand 
this after you have been three times ridi- 
culed as a reformer ; and then you will begin 
to see that throughout the community, run- 
ning through every one, there are currents of 
beneficent power that accomplish changes, 
sometimes visible, sometimes hard to see; 
that this power is in its nature quite as 
strong, quite as real and reliable, as that 
Wall Street current, — terrible forces both 

60 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

of them, forever operative and struggling 
and contending together as they surge and 
swell through the people. It is the sight 
of that power for good that you need. I 
cannot give it to you. You must sink your 
own shaft for it. It is this beneficent cur- 
rent passing from man to man that makes 
the unity of all efforts for public better- 
ment. You have a movement and an ex- 
citement over bad water, and it leaves you 
with kindergartens in your schools. It is 
this current that turns your remark at the 
club (which every one repeated in order to 
injure you) into a piece of encouragement to 
the banker's clerk, who could not have made 
it himself except at the cost of his livelihood. 
It is this current — not only the fear of it, but 
the presence of it — in the heart of your mer- 
chants that leaves them at your mercy. Cast 
anything into this current and it goes every- 
where, like aniline dye put into a reservoir ; 
it tinges the whole local life in twenty-four 
hours. It is to this current that all appeals 
are made. All party platforms, all resolu- 
tions, all lies are dedicated to it ; all literature 
lives by it. The head of power is near and 
easy if you strike directly for it. 

There is an opinion abroad that good poli- 
tics requires that every man should give his 

6i 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

whole time to politics. This is another of 
the superstitions disseminated by the politi- 
cians who want us to go to their primaries, 
and accepted by people so ignorant of life 
that they believe that the temperature de- 
pends upon the thermometer. 

Why, you are running those primaries now. 
If you were different, they would become dif- 
ferent. You need never go near them. Go 
into that camp where your instinct leads you. 
The improvement in politics will not be marked 
by any cyclonic overturn. There will always 
be two parties competing for your vote. It 
takes no more time to vote for a good man 
than for a bad man. There will be no more 
men in public life then than now. There 
will be no overt change in conditions. A few 
leaders will stand for the new forces. It is 
true that it requires a general increase of in- 
terest on the part of every one, in order that 
these men shall be found. Your personal 
duty is to support them in private and pub- 
lic. That is all. The extent to which you 
yourself become involved in public affairs de- 
pends upon chances with which you need not 
concern yourself. Only try to understand 
what is happening under your eyes. Every 
time you see a group of men advancing some 
cause that seems sensible, and being de- 

62 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

nounced on all hands as ** self-appointed," 
see if it was not something in yourself, after 
all, that appointed those men. 

As we grow old, what have we to rely on 
as a touchstone for the times? You once 
had your own causes and enthusiasms, but 
you cannot understand these new ones. You 
had your certificate from the Almighty, but 
these fellows are " self-appointed." What 
you wanted was clear, but these men want 
something unattainable, something that soci- 
ety, as you know it, cannot supply. Calm 
yourself, my friend ; perhaps they bring it. 

Has the great Philosophy of Evolution 
done nothing for the mind of man, that new 
developments, as they arrive, are received with 
the same stony solemnity, are greeted with 
the same phrases as ever? How can you 
have the ingenuousness to argue soberly 
against me, supplying me, by every word you 
say, with new illustrations, new hope, new 
fuel? Until I heard you repeat word by word 
the prayer-book of crumbling conservatism, I 
was not sure I was right. You have placed 
the great seal of the world upon new truth. 
Thus should it be received. 

The radicals are really always saying the 
same thing. They do not change ; everybody 
else changes. They are accused of the most 

63 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania 
for power, indifference to the fate of their 
own cause, fanaticism, triviaHty, want of 
humor, buffoonery and irreverence. But 
they sound a certain note. Hence the great 
practical power of consistent radicals. To all 
appearance nobody follows them, yet every 
one believes them. They hold a tuning-fork 
and sound A, and everybody knows it really 
is A, though the time-honored pitch is G flat. 
The community cannot get that A out of its 
head. Nothing can prevent an upward ten- 
dency in the popular tone so long as the real 
A is kept sounding. Every now and then the 
whole town strikes it for a week, and all the 
bells ring, and then all sinks to suppressed 
discord and denial. 

The reason why we have not, of late years, 
had strong consistent centres of influence, 
focuses of steady political power, has been 
that the community has not developed men 
who could hold the note. It was only when 
the note made a temporary concord with 
some heavy political scheme that the reform 
leaders could hear it themselves. For the rest 
of the time it threw the whole civilization 
out of tune. The terrible clash of interests 
drowned it. The reformers themselves lost 
it, and wandered up and down, guessing. 

64 



BETWEEN ELECTIONS 

It is imagined that nature goes by jumps, 
and that a whole community can suddenly 
sing in tune, after it has been caterwauling 
and murdering the scale for twenty years. 
The truth is, we ought to thank God when 
any man or body of men make the discovery 
that there is such a thing as absolute pitch, 
or absolute honesty, or absolute personal and 
intellectual integrity. A few years of this 
spirit will identify certain men with the funda- 
mental idea that truth is stronger than conse- 
quences, and these men will become the most 
serious force and the only truly political force 
in their community. Their ambition is illimi- 
table, for you cannot set bounds to personal 
influence. But it is an ambition that cannot 
be abused. A departure from their own 
course will ruin any one of them in a night, 
and undo twenty years of service. 

It would be natural that such sets of men 
should arise all over the country, men who 
" wanted " nothing, and should reveal the in- 
verse position of the Boss System ; a set of 
moral bosses with no organizations, no poli- 
tics ; men thrown into prominence by the op- 
eration of all the forces of human nature now 
suppressed, and the suppression of those now 
operative. It is obvious that one such man 
will suffice for a town. In the competition of 
S 65 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

character, one man will be naturally fixed 
upon, whom his competitors will be the first 
to honor; and upon him will be condensed 
the public feeling, the confidence of the com- 
munity. If the extreme case do not arise, 
nevertheless it is certain that the tendencies 
toward a destruction of the present system, 
will reveal themselves as a tendency making 
for the weight of personal character in prac- 
tical politics. 

Reform politics is, after all, a simple thing. 
It demands no great attainments. You can 
play the game in the dark. A child can 
understand it. There are no subtleties nor 
obscurities, no higher analysis or mystery of 
any sort. If you want a compass at any mo- 
ment in the midst of some difficult situation, 
you have only to say to yourself, '' Life is 
larger than this little imbroglio. I shall follow 
my instinct." As you say this, your compass 
swings true. You may be surprised to find 
what course it points to. But what it tells 
you to do will be practical agitation. 



66 



Ill 

THE MASSES 

Let us examine current beliefs on popular 
education, and then thereafter let us look very 
closely at the work done among the poor, 
and see upon what lines it has been found 
possible to establish influence. 

Why is it that if you go down to the Bow- 
ery and set up a kindergarten or give a course 
of lectures on the Duties of Citizenship, 
every one commends you ; whereas if you go 
into some abandoned district where a Tam- 
many thug is running for the State Assembly 
against a Repubhcan heeler, and if you put 
an honest man in the field against them both, 
your friends call you a fool, and say that 
your reform consists of mere negation? 

Who asks to see the results upon the pub- 
lic welfare of a night school in astronomy? 
Yet, if you get ten mechanics to labor for six 
months with the fire of enthusiasm in them, 
building up a radical club, and as a result, 
one hundred and fifty men cast for the first 

67 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

time in their lives a vote that represents the 
heart and conscience of each, your intelligent 
friends ask, *' What have you done? You are 
howling against the moon." 

Why is it that if you are a grocer and 
refuse to sand your sugar, you are called 
honest? Yet, if a young politician takes this 
course, it is supposed that life is not long 
enough for the world to discover his value ; 
he is a visionary. In the sugar trade, the man 
insisted upon deaHng with the community as 
a whole. He was not trying to sell sugar to 
a club, or to benefit some district. He dealt 
with the public. Now, if a politician deals 
directly with the public, we condemn him 
because we cannot see the empire of confi- 
dence he is building up. The reason we do 
not see it is entirely due to historical causes. 
We have had little experience recently in the 
utility of large appeals. We forget their 
power. Yet we are not without examples. 
Grover Cleveland dealt directly with the peo- 
ple on a great scale. He established a per- 
sonal relation that was stronger than party 
bonds. This made him President, preserved 
his character and gave reality to politics. It 
was a bit of education to every man in the 
United States to see what riff-raff our politi- 
cal arks were made of: a man laid his hand 

68 



THE MASSES 

on the end of one of them and tore off the 
roof. 

We are rather more familiar with the power 
of pubHc confidence as seen in times of revo- 
lution. In the year of the Lexow investigation 
the people of New York City believed that 
Dr. Parkhurst and John Goff were in earnest. 
There was a period of a few weeks when Goff 
exercised the powers of a dictator. The Police 
Commissioners had threatened to discipline a 
subordinate who had testified before Goff's 
committee. He subpoenaed them all the 
next morning, and he browbeat them like 
school-boys. They went back humbled. 
The revelations of the summer had awakened 
the spirit of revolt in the masses of the people, 
and it expressed itself directly as power. The 
machinery of government was not in abey- 
ance, but it was seen to be a mere vehicle. 
It could be made to work justice. Here were 
two men, Goff and Parkhurst, rendered all- 
powerful by the existence of popular confi- 
dence. The state of mind of the community 
was unusual, and the indignation soon sub- 
sided ; but it subsided to a new level, and the 
abuses and inhumanity of Boss tyranny have 
never since been so severe in New York. 

Our people have seen several volcanic 
eruptions of this sort, and therefore they 

69 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

believe in them. They believe in the moral 
power of the community, but are afraid it 
can only act by convulsion. They think that 
some new principle comes into play at such 
times, something which is not a constant 
factor in daily government. On the other 
hand, we have all been trained to respect 
plodding methods in common education, and 
we know that much can be done by kinder- 
gartens, boys' clubs, and propaganda to 
change the standards of the community and 
make men trust virtue. We believe in the 
boys' club, and we believe in the earthquake ; 
we forget that the same principle underlies 
them both. When some one applies this 
principle to the field of political education 
that lies between them, we are cynical be- 
cause we have no experience. 

Apart from the lack of experience that 
prevents people from seeing the use of this 
practical activity, there are two distressing 
elements that make men not want to see it. 
In the first place, even if you work in the 
Bowery and a friend votes in Harlem, you 
are apt to be hitting his interests and preju- 
dices. And in the second place your conduct 
is a horrid appeal. If this work is useful, he 
ought to be doing it. He had hoped that 
nothing could be done. 

70 



THE MASSES 

The real distinction between this particular 
sort of work and other philanthropy is, that 
other philanthropy is preparatory drill ; this 
is war. The other is feeding, training, and 
preaching; this is practice. Now, you may 
have your license to preach all you please 
in the vineyard, but if you touch the soil 
with the spade, you find the ground is pre- 
empted ; you are fighting a railroad. And 
this condition is openly recognized in cities 
where the evil forces are completely dominant. 

In lecturing before the University Exten- 
sion in Pennsylvania, you are not allowed to 
talk politics. It is against the policy of the 
philanthropists who run the institution, and 
who are run by the railroad. The situation 
in Philadelphia is merely illustrative of the 
distinction between philanthropy and political 
reform, which is always ready to become 
apparent. Of course, so long as the railroad 
distributes the philanthropy, there will result 
nothing but tyranny. The Roman Emperors 
gave shows to amuse the people, and we 
give them talks on Botticelli and magic-lan- 
tern pictures of the Nile. There are, then, 
real reasons why our people are slow to ac- 
knowledge the utility of militant political 
reform, and why they clutch at any handle 



agamst it. 



71 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

But we have much more to learn from the 
philanthropists by a study of what they have 
done than by dwelling on their shortcom- 
ings. They have labored while the political 
reformers have slept ; and after many trials 
and many failures they have found certain 
working principles. 

It was they who discovered that we cannot, 
as human nature is constituted, give strength 
to any one except by helping the whole man 
to develop at once. We must give him a 
chance to grow. The workers among the 
poor have long ago seen the futility of any 
effort except that of raising the general stand- 
ards of living. They have established Settle- 
ments, where the relation between the settlers 
and the surrounding population is as natural 
as family life and as perennial as Tammany 
Hall. After ten years of experiment this has 
been done in many places. If you will go to 
one of these places and study exactly what 
has happened in the line of benefit to the 
people, you will see that it has resulted 
wholly from personal influence, — that is to 
say, from the effect of character upon char- 
acter. '' Two years ago we established a boys' 
club, and soon afterwards a kindergarten. The 
boys returned one day, and out of jealousy 
smashed everything belonging to the kinder- 

72 



THE MASSES 

garten, and piled the rubbish in the middle 
of the room. Last week a barrel of fruit was 
sent here for the sick and weakly, and we 
left the barrel open with a card on the out- 
side to that effect. You could not get the 
boys to touch the fruit. Now, if you ask me 
what system or what part of the system has 
caused the change in these boys, I don't 
know." 

This is reform politics, but unless you and 
I go there and make a place for these boys 
in practical politics, they will find waiting for 
them nothing but the caucus and the job. 
They will relapse and forget. It is throwing 
effort into the sea to train the young if you 
stop there. The test comes when the scaffold- 
ings of early life are taken down. Each man 
meets the world alone. The tragedies of char- 
acter occur at this period. We must make a 
camp and standing ground for grown men. 
So far as the hope of political purity goes, 
there are acres of this city that are in a worse 
condition than health was in before the era of 
hospitals. Fly over them as the crow flies, 
and you cannot find a centre of downright 
antagonism to evil. The population does 
not know that such a thing exists ; and yet, 
if you propose to go there and set up a fight 
against both parties, — that is to say, a fight 

73 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

against wickedness, — you are told by patriots 
and doctors of divinity, " Don't do it unless 
you can win. You will disgust people with 
reform." 

It is awful and at the same time ludicrous 
to hear an educated person maintain this 
doctrine and in the same breath mourn over 
the corruption of the masses. The man 
throws his own dark shadow over them and 
bewails their want of light. He doubts the 
power of personal influence ; and yet there 
is absolutely no other force for good in the 
world, and never has been. Let us stick to 
facts. Take individual cases of improvement 
and see what power has been at work. You 
will find that you disclose behind any per- 
sonal improvement, not a ballot law or an 
organization, but a human being. 

The movement for political reform goes 
into the Bowery in the wake of the philan- 
thropists. We go there knowing something 
about practical politics. We know, for in- 
stance, that the Bowery is the geographical 
name for a district which is really governed 
by the same forces as Fifth Avenue. To 
think that the politics of the Bowery are con- 
trolled by the Bowery is about as sensible as 
to believe that the politics of Irkutsk are con- 
trolled at Irkutsk. We have got, first, to dis- 

74 



THE MASSES 

close the machinery of evil and then to fight 
it wherever we find it, even though it lead us 
into churches. Nothing is needed in any 
Tammany club on the Bowery that is not 
needed ten times as much in the Union 
League Club on Fifth Avenue — personal 
self-sacrifice for principle in a cause which 
is apparently hopeless. Unless you go there 
displaying that, you are not needed. 

Our intercourse with the laboring man is 
a great teacher to ourselves. That is its 
main use. It brings out, as nothing else 
can, the magnitude and perfection of the 
system, whose visible top and little flag we 
can always see, but whose dimensions and 
ramifications nothing but experiment can 
reveal; philosophy could not guess it. 

Here is a laborer on the street railroad. 
In order to get work he must show a ticket 
from the party boss. It is his passport from 
the Czar, countersigned by the proper offi- 
cial; otherwise he gets no job. Here is a 
young notary whom you employ to carry 
about the certificate that puts an independent 
candidate in nomination. You try to get him 
to sign the thing himself and join your club. 
It is no use asking. His brother did it once 
and lost his place ; so close is the scrutiny, so 
rapid the punishment. Examine the retail 

75 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

grocer, or the tobacconist, or the cobbler ; go 
into particulars with him, and you will find 
that his unwillingness to join your movement 
does not spring so directly from his inability 
to see the point of it, as from fear of the direct 
and Immediate consequences to himself. 

We wanted to elevate the masses, but it 
turns out, as the philanthropists discerned 
long ago, that there are no masses in Amer- 
ica, there are no masses in New York City. 
We can discover only individuals, who are 
each controlled by individual interests, by 
various and subtle considerations. These 
men are in chains to other men, who often 
Hve in other parts of the city. 

The attorneys and merchants, the business 
world in fact, is found to be In league with 
abuse. The man who signs the laborer's 
license to work reports twice a day to a big 
contractor who is director in a bank whose 
president owns the opera house and en- 
dowed the sailors' home. He built the yacht 
club, Is vestryman in the biggest church, and 
Is revered by all men. The title-deeds and 
registry books of all visible wealth, show the 
names of his Intimate friends. All we can do 
in the way of weakening the chains is to ex- 
pose them ; this cruelty is largely ignorance. 
The beneficiaries must be made to see the 

76 



THE MASSES 

sources of their wealth. It is pre-occupation 
with business, not coldness of heart, that con- 
ceals the conditions. The American business 
man is a warm-hearted being. He does not 
even care for money, but for the game of 
business. 

As matters now stand in America, we see 
this condition, — that it is for the immediate 
interest of the dominant class, namely, the 
politico-financial class, to keep the people as 
selfish as possible. We have examined the 
subtle strains of influence and prejudice by 
which this commercial interest has been ex- 
tended, until, as a practical matter, it is almost 
impossible for a man to get word to the labor- 
ing classes that there exists such a thing as 
political morality. Some professional philan- 
thropist always stands ready to prevent the 
signal of honesty from being raised ; some 
set of Sunday citizens interposes to stop the 
unwise, inexpedient, foolhardy attempt to be 
independent of rascality. 

And when you do succeed in reaching the 
mechanic, what can you do for him? Tell 
him to be a man, and strike off the shackles 
that bind him. 

Here we are, as helpless before the poor as 
before the rich, facing both of them with the 
same query, " Can you not see that your own 

77 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

concession, call it poverty, or call It poverty 
of will, is one element of this oppression? " 

The difference between the poor and the 
financial classes is one of spiritual complexity. 
The promoters are well-to-do because their 
minds have been able to grasp and utilize the 
complex forces made up of the minds of their 
simpler fellow-beings. And this astuteness 
leaves them less open to unselfish emotions 
than the laboring man. His nature Is more 
Intact. He Is a more emotional and instinc- 
tive being. It Is for this reason that moral 
reforms have come from the lower strata of 
society. The people have as much to lose 
as the bankers, but they are more ready to 
lose It. 

The head of moral feeling in the community 
has got to grow strong enough to force the 
financier to take his clutch off the laboring 
man, before you can reach the laboring man. 
And yet labor Itself will contribute more than 
its share towards this head of moral feeling ; 
and therefore you must go among the labor- 
mg classes with your ideas and your propa- 
ganda. But beware lest you give him a 
stone for bread. You can do no more for 
a man because you call yourself a " politi- 
cian" than if yoU were a mere philanthropist. 
A man's standards of political thought are but 

78 



THE MASSES 

a small fraction of his general standards, and 
unless your sense of truth is as sharp as a 
sword you had better not come near the 
laboring man. 

The point here made is — and it is of great 
importance — that we candidly acknowledge 
at every instant the nature of our undertak- 
ing and the nature of our power, for in so far 
as we mistake them we weaken our practical 
utility. 

It is not as the agent of any institution 
that you are here, but as the agent of con- 
science at the dictation of personal feeling. 
Do you need proof that you yourself draw 
all your power from sheer moral influence? 
Note what you do when you start your club. 
You go to the nearest well-to-do person and 
ask for money for rent. He gives it to you 
out of his fund of general benevolence. To 
whom do you really want to distribute this 
benevolence? To every one. You feel that 
by passing it on through a group and series 
of boys and young men you can benefit the 
whole country. You use them as a mere 
vehicle. You know that you can only help 
them by getting them to help others. Your 
appeal for clients then goes out to the whole 
district. Your club puts you in communica- 
tion with every man in it. In teaching your 

79 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

club or in exhorting any mortal to good be- 
havior, what method, what stimulus, do you 
use ? Whether you know it or not, you are 
really drawing support from every one who 
is following the same principle, all over the 
city, all over the country, all over the world. 
Do you not ceaselessly appeal to the ex- 
amples of Washington and Lincoln, to the 
books and conduct of men whose aims were 
your aims? Or take your own case. Why 
do you occupy yourself with this thing? 
This activity satisfies your demands upon 
life; nothing else does. You are the crea- 
ture of a thousand influences, and if you begin 
to trace them you find that you are fulfilling 
the will of Toynbee, of John Stuart Mill, of 
Kant. You are a disciple of Tolstoi. You 
were inspired by William Lloyd Garrison. 
It is they, as much as you, who are doing this 
work. It is they who formulated the ideas 
and impressed them upon you. Your great 
friends are the founders of religions. Ex- 
amine the actual persons who give you prac- 
tical help. You will find Moses, you wi'll 
find Christ behind them. What you are 
using is the world's fund of unselfishness. 
It is necessary to employ the whole of it in 
order to accomplish anything, however small. 
As a practical matter, every one does employ 

80 



THE MASSES 

the whole of it every time he even thinks of 
reform. 

Now, just as we can trace the sources of 
our power in the great currents of human 
feehng that flow down to us out of the past; 
so we can foresee the accomplishments of 
that power in enlarging the lives of men who 
come after us. We are sinking the founda- 
tions of a new politics. You cannot always 
see every stone, but it has gone to its place. 
It is impossible to take a stand for what you 
think is a true theory without thereby be- 
coming an integral factor for good in every 
man who hears of it. It is impossible to be 
that factor without taking that stand. 

What is the nature of the good you can 
do to the laboring man ? His mind analyzes 
you in a flash. If he is influenced by you, 
you may be sure that it is by something in 
you that you had not intended to give him. 
After the man has seen you, he has been 
moved by you ; but how? Consult your own 
remembrance. What incident of character 
impressed you most when you were a child ? 
Do you remember any act, any expression 
or gesture or anecdote or speech, that had a 
lasting influence upon you? Now I ask you 
this : Was it done for you ? Were you the 
designed beneficiary of it? Was it not rather 
6 8i 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

the silent part of some one else's conduct, a 
thing you were perhaps not meant to see at 
all? And this was no accident. This is the 
natural history of influence ; it passes uncon- 
sciously from life to life. 

We must take the world as we find it. We 
must deal with human nature according to 
the laws of human nature. Our politics are 
at present so artificial that the average man 
thinks that the name " politics " prevents the 
well established and familiar principles of 
human nature from being operative. But he 
is wrong. Man has never yet succeeded in 
inventing any system that could evade them 
or affect them in the least. All the political 
organization of reform is already in exist- 
ence, and needs only strengthening and de- 
veloping. It is all in use, and every one 
understands its use and knows its headquar- 
ters and its agencies. It is all individual 
character and courage, and with the growth 
of character and courage it will become more 
defined and visible every day. 



82 



IV 

LITERATURE 

There are feelings and views about life, 
there are conviction and insight, which come 
from thinking at a high rate of speed, and 
vanish when the machinery moves slowly 
and the blood ebbs. The world not only 
accepts the intensity of the writer, but de- 
mands it. Nevertheless, the world has an 
imperfect knowledge as to where this inten- 
sity comes from, how it is produced, or what 
relation it bears to ugliness and falsehood. 
"What a pleasure it must be to you," said 
Rothschild to Heine, "to be able to turn off 
those little songs ! " 

In our ordinary moods we regard the con- 
clusions of the poets as both true and un- 
true, — true to feeling, untrue to fact ; true as 
intimations of the next world or of some lost 
world; untrue here, because detached from 
those portions of society that are peren- 
nially visible. Most men have a duplicate 
philosophy which enables them to love the 

83 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

arts and the wit of mankind, at the same 
time that they conveniently despise them. 
Life is ugly and necessary ; art is beautiful 
and impossible. " The farther you go from 
the facts of life, the nearer you get to poetry. 
The practical problem is to keep them in 
separate spheres, and to enjoy both." The 
hypothesis of a duplicity in the universe 
explains everything, and staves off all claims 
and questionings. 

Such are the convictions of the average 
cultivated man. His back is broken, but 
he lives in the two halves comfortably 
enough. He has to be protected at his weak 
spot, of course, and that spot is the present ; 
ten years from now, to-morrow, yesterday, 
the day of judgment, the State of Penn- 
sylvania, — all these you are welcome to. 
Every form of idealism appeals to him, so 
long as it does not ask him to budge out of 
his armchair. "Aha," he says, "I under- 
stand this. It takes its place in the realm 
of the Imagination. " 

This man does not know, and has no means 
of knowing, that good books are only written 
by men whose backs are not broken, and 
whose vital energy circulates through their 
entire system in one sweep. They have a 
unitary and not a duplicate philosophy. 

84 



LITERATURE 

The present is their strong point. The 
actualities of life are their passion. They 
lay a bold hand upon everything within their 
reach, for they see it with new sight. 

The glitter of the past makes us think of 
literature as embodied in books; but to 
understand literature we must fix our minds 
on authors, not on books. The men who 
write — 'what makes them write well or ill? 
What are the conditions that breed poetry, 
or music, or architecture.? The current be- 
liefs about art and letters are fatalistic. 
It is supposed that poets and artists crop 
up now and then, and that nothing can stop 
them; they need no aid, they conquer cir- 
cumstances. I do not believe it. We see 
no analogy to it in nature. Among the 
plants and the fishes we see nothing but 
a wholesale and incredible destruction of 
germs on all sides. It seems a miracle that 
any seed should fall upon good ground, and 
be sheltered till it come to the flower. Why 
should the percentage of germs that come to 
maturity be greater with genius than it is 
with the eggs of the sturgeon? The ene- 
mies of each are numerous. If it were not 
for the fecundity of nature, we should have 
none of either of them. And how is it that 
the great man always happens to be young 

85 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

at the very moment when some events are 
going forward that ripen his powers ; so that 
he grows up with his time, and does some- 
thing that is comprehensible to all time? 

The answer is, that all eras are sown thick 
with the seeds of genius, which for the most 
part die, but in a favoring age mature to 
greatness. Must we resort to a theory of 
special creation to explain the great talents 
of the world? And even this would not 
explain our own welcome and our own com- 
prehension of them when they come. If it 
were not for the undeveloped powers, the 
seeds of genius, in ourselves, Plato and Bach 
would be meaningless, and Christ would 
have died in vain. 

It must be that thousands of good intel- 
lects perish annually. The men do not die, 
but their powers wither, or rather never 
mature. Art, like everything else, repre- 
sents an escape, a survival. In any age that 
lacks it, or is weak in it, we may look about 
for the enginery by which it is crushed. In 
looking into a past age we are put to infer- 
ence and conjecture. We see the mark of 
fetters upon the Byzantine soul, and we 
begin dredging the dark waters of history 
for a metaphysical cause. We cannot walk 
into a Byzantine shop and watch the appren- 

86 



LITERATURE 

tice at work. But in our own time we can 
see the whole process in action. We can 
study our modern Inquisitions at leisure, 
and note every mark that is made upon a 
soul that is passing through them. 

It does not involve any indignity to the 
pretensions of literature if we walk into 
that great bazaar, modern journalism, and 
see what is going on there behind the 
counters. Here is a factory of popular art. 
It is not the whole of letters; but it has 
an influence on the whole of letters. The 
press fills the consciousness of the people. 
A modern community breathes through its 
press. Journalism, to be sure, is a region 
of letters, where all the factors for truth are 
at a special and peculiar discount. Its atten- 
tion is given to near and ugly things, to 
mean quarrels, business interests, and spe- 
cial ends. Every country shows up badly 
here. The hypocrisy of the press is the 
worst thing in England. It is the worst 
exhibition of England's worst fault. The 
press of France gives you France at her 
weakest. The press of America gives you 
America at her cheapest. Perhaps the study 
of journalism in any country would illus- 
trate the peculiar vices of that country; and 
it is fair to remember this in examining our 

87 



PRACTICAL AGITx^TION 

own press. But examine it we must, for it 
is important. 

The subject includes more than the daily 
newspapers. Those ephemeral sheets that 
flutter from the table into the waste-paper 
basket, which are something more than mere 
newspapers and less than magazines, and 
the magazines themselves, which are more 
than budgets of gossip and less than books, 
make up a perpetual rain of paper and ink. 
Thousands of people are engaged in writing 
them, and millions in reading them. This 
whole species of literature is typical of the 
age; let us see how it is conducted. 

A journal is a meeting-place between the 
forces of intellect and of commerce. The 
men who become editors always bear some 
relation to the intellectual interests of the 
country. They make money, but they make 
it by understanding the minds of people 
who are not taking money, but thought, 
from the exchanges that the editors set up. 
A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each 
is an experiment and represents a new focus, 
a new ratio between commerce and intellect. 
Even trade journals have columns devoted 
to general information and jokes. The one 
thing a journal must have in order to be a 
journal is circulation. It must be carried 

SB 



LITERATURE 

into people's houses, and this is brought 
about by an impulse in the buyer. The 
buyer has many opinions and modes of 
thought that he does not draw from the 
journal, and he is always ready to drop a 
journal that offends him. An editor is thus 
constantly forced to choose between affront- 
ing his public and placating his public. 
Now, whatever arguments may be given for 
his taking one course or the other, it re- 
mains clear that in so far as an editor is not 
publishing what he himself thinks of inter- 
est for its own sake, he is encouraging in the 
public something else besides intellect. He 
is subserving financial, political, or reli- 
gious bias, or, it may be, popular whim. 
He is, to this extent at least, the custodian 
and protector of prejudice. 

The thrift of an editor-owner, who is 
building up the circulation of a paper, tends 
to keep him conservative. Repetition is 
safer than innovation. An especially strong 
temptation is spread before the American 
editor in the shape of an enormous reading 
public, made up of people who have a com- 
mon-school education, and who resemble 
each other very closely in their traits of 
mind. There is money to be made by 
any one who discerns a new way of re- 

89 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

inforcing any prejudice of the American 
people. 

It has come about very naturally during 
the last thirty years, that journalism has 
been developed in America as one of the 
branches in the science of catering to the 
masses on a gigantic scale. The different 
kinds of conservatism have been banked, 
consolidated, and, as it were, marshalled 
under the banners of as many journals. 
Money and energy have been expended in 
collecting these vast audiences, and sleepless 
vigilance is needed to keep them together. 

The great investments in the good will 
of millions are nursed by editors who live 
by their talents, and who in another age 
would have been intellectual men. The 
highest type of editor now extant in America 
will as frankly regret his own obligation to 
cater to mediocrity, as the business man will 
regret his obligation to pay blackmail, or as 
the citizen will regret his obligation to vote 
for one of the parties. "There is nothing 
else to do. I am dealing with the money of 
others. There are not enough intelligent 
people to count." He serves the times. 
The influence thus exerted by the public 
(through the editor) upon the writer tends to 
modify the writer and make him resemble 

90 



LITERATURE 

the public. It is a spiritual pressure exerted 
by the majority in favor of conformity. This 
exists in all countries, but is peculiarly 
severe in countries and ages where the 
majority is made up of individuals very 
similar to each other. The tyranny of 
a uniform population always makes itself 
felt. 

If any man doubt the hide-bound char- 
acter of our journals to-day, let him try this 
experiment. Let him write down what he 
thinks upon any matter, write a story of 
any length, a poem, a prayer, a speech. 
Let him assume, as he writes it, that it can- 
not be published, and let him satisfy his 
individual taste in the subject, size, mood, 
and tenor of the whole composition. Then 
let him begin his peregrinations to find in 
which one of the ten thousand journals of 
America there is a place for his ideas as 
they stand. We have more journals than 
any other country. The whole field of ideas 
has been covered; every vehicle of opinion 
has its policy, its methods, its precedents. 
A hundred will receive him if he shaves 
this, pads that, cuts it in half; but not one 
of them will trust him as he stands, "Good, 
but eccentric," " Good, but too long," " Good, 
but new." 

91 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

Let us folldw the steps of this withering 
influence. A young illustrator does an etch- 
ing that he likes. He is told to reduce it 
to the conventional standard. This is easy, 
but what is happening in the process.? He 
blurs the fine edges of vision, not only on 
the plate, but in his own mind. The real 
injury to intellect is not done in the edito- 
rial sanctum. It is done in the mind of the 
writer who himself attempts to cater to the 
prejudice of others. A man rewrites a scene 
in a story to please a public. In order to 
do this he is obliged to forget what his story 
was about. He is talking by rote; he is 
making an imitation. Does this seem a 
small thing? Let any one do it once and 
see where it leads him. The attitude of the 
whole human being towards his whole life 
is changed by the experience. Do it twice, 
and you can hardly shake off the practice. 
Write and publish six editorials for the 
"Universalist," and then sit down to write 
one not in the style of the " Universalist. " 
You will find it, practically, an impossibility. 

The notable lack in our literature is this: 
the prickles and irregularities of personal 
feeling have been pumice-stoned away. It 
is too smooth. There is an absence of 
individuality, of private opinion. This is 

92 



LITERATURE 

the same lack that curses our politics, — 
the absence of private opinion. 

The sacrifice in political life is honesty, 
in literary life is intellect; but the closer 
you examine honesty and intellect the more 
clearly they appear to be the same thing. 
Suppose that a judge, in order to please a 
boss, awards Parson Jones' cow to Deacon 
Brown; does he boldly admit this even to 
himself.? Never. Rewrites an able opin- 
ion in which he befogs his intelligence, and 
convinces himself that he has arrived at his 
award by logical steps. In like manner, 
the revising editor who reads with the eyes 
of the farmer's daughter begins to lose his 
own. He is extinguishing some sparks of 
instructive reality which would offend — and 
benefit — the farmer's daughter; and he is 
obliterating a part of his own mind with 
every stroke of his blue pencil. He is de- 
vitalizing literature by erasing personality. 
He does this in the money interests of a 
syndicate ; but the debasing effect upon char- 
acter is the same as if it were done at the 
dictate of the German Emperor. The harm 
done in either case is intellectual. 

Take another example. A reporter writes 
up a public meeting, but colors it with the 
creed of his journal. Can he do this accept- 

93 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

ably without abjuring his own senses? He 
is competing with men whose every energy 
is bent on seeing the occasion as the news- 
paper wishes it seen. Consider the immense 
difficulty of telling the truth on the witness 
stand, and judge whether good reporting is 
easy. The newspaper trade, as now con- 
ducted, is prostitution. It mows down the 
boys as they come from the colleges. It 
defaces the very desire for truth, and leaves 
them without a principle to set a clock 
by. They grow to disbelieve in the reality 
of ideas. But these are our future literati, 
our poets and essayists, our historians and 
publicists. 

The experts who sit in the offices of the 
journals of the country have so long used 
their minds as commercial instruments, that 
it never occurs to them to publish or not 
publish anything, according to their personal 
views. They do not know that every time 
they subserve prejudice they are ruining 
intellect. If there were an editor who had 
any suspicion of the way the world is put 
together, he would respect talent as he 
respects honor. It would be impossible for 
him to make his living by this traffic. If 
he knew what he was doing, he would prefer 
penury. 

94 



LITERATURE 

These men, then, have not the least idea 
of the function they fulfil. No more has 
the agent of the Insurance Company who 
corrupts a legislature. The difference in 
degree between the two iniquities is enor- 
mous, because one belongs to that region in 
the scale of morality which is completely 
understood, and the other does not. We do 
not excuse the insurance agent; we will not 
allow him to plead ignorance. He commits 
a penal offence. We will not allow selfish- 
ness to trade upon selfishness and steal from 
the public in this form. But what law can 
protect the public interest in the higher 
faculties? What statute can enforce artistic 
truth ? 

We actually forbid a man by statute to 
sell his vote, because a vote is understood 
to be an opinion, a thing dependent on 
rational and moral considerations. You 
cannot buy and sell it without turning it 
into something else. The exercise of that 
infinitesimal fraction of public power repre- 
sented by one man's vote is hedged about 
with penalties ; because the logic of practi- 
cal government has forced us to see its im- 
portance. But the harm done to a community 
by the sale of a vote does not follow by 
virtue of the statute, but by virtue of a law 

95 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

of influence of which the statute is the 
recognition. The same law governs the 
sale of any opinion, whether it be conveyed 
in a book review or in a political speech, 
in a picture of life and manners, a poem, a 
novel, or an etching. There is no depart- 
ment of life in which you can lie for private 
gain without doing harm. The grosser 
forms of it give us the key to the subtler 
ones, and the jail becomes the symbol of 
that condition into which the violation of 
truth will shut any mind. 

So far as any man comes directly in con- 
tact with the agencies of organized litera- 
ture, let him remember that his mind is at 
stake. They can change you, but you cannot 
change them, except by changing the pub- 
lic they reflect. The faculties of man are 
as strong as steel if properly used, but they 
are like the down on a peach if improperly 
used. What shall a man take in exchange 
for his soul.? No man has the privilege 
upon this earth of being more than one 
person. In this matter of expression, it is 
the last ten per cent of accuracy that saves 
or sells you. Talent evaporates as easily as 
a delegate holds his tongue or a lawyer 
smiles to a rich man; and the injury is 
irremediable. Let a man not alter a line or 

96 



LITERATURE 

cut a paragraph at the suggestion of an 
editor. Those are the very words that are 
valuable. "Ah," you say, "but I need 
criticism." Then go to a critic. Consult 
the man who is farthest away from this 
influence, some one who cannot read the 
magazines, some one who does not have to 
read them. Your public, when you get one, 
will qualify the general public; but you 
must reach it as a whole man. The writer's 
course is easy compared to that of the 
reform politician, because printing is cheap. 
He will get heard immediately. He covers 
the whole of the United States while the 
other is canvassing a ward. Literary self- 
assertion is as much needed as any of the 
virtue we pray for in politics. A resonant 
and unvexed independence makes a man's 
words stir the fibres in other men ; and it 
matters little whether you label his words 
literature or politics. 

The difficulty in any revolt against cus- 
tom, the struggle a man has in getting his 
mind free from the cobwebs of restraint, 
always turns out to involve financial dis- 
tress; and this holds true of the writer's 
attempt to override the senseless restrictions 
of the press. The magazines pay hand- 
somely, and pay at once. A writer must 
7 97 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

earn his bread; a man must support his 
family. We accept this necessity with such 
a hearty concurrence, and the necessity 
itself becomes so sacred, that it seems to 
imply an answer to all ethical and artistic 
questions. We almost think that nature 
will connive at malpractice done in so good 
a cause as the support of a family. The 
subject must be looked at more narrowly. 
The spur of poverty is popularly regarded 
not only as an excuse for all bad work, but 
as a prerequisite to all good work. There 
is a misconception in this wholesale appro- 
priation of a partial truth. The economic 
laws are valuable and suggestive, but they 
are founded on the belief that a man will 
pursue his own business interests exclu- 
sively. This is never entirely true even in 
trade, and the doctrines of the economists 
become more and more misleading when 
applied to fields of life where the money 
motive becomes incidental. The law of 
supply and demand does not govern the pro- 
duction of sonnets. 

Let us lay aside theory and observe the 
effects of want upon the artist and his work. 
As a stimulus to the whole man, a prod to 
get him into action and keep him active, 
the spur of poverty is a blessing. But if it 

98 



LITERATURE 

enter into the detail of his attention, while 
he is at work, it is damnation. 

A man at work is like a string that is 
vibrating. Touch it with a feather and it is 
numb. A singer will sing fiat if he sees a 
friend in the audience. Even a trained and 
cold-blooded lawyer who is trying a case, 
will not be at his best if he is watched by 
some one whom he wants to impress. 

The artist is the easiest of all men to 
upset. He is dealing with subtle and fluid 
things, — memories, allusions, associations. 
It is all gossamer and sunlight when he 
begins. It is to be gossamer and sunlight 
when he is finished. But in the interim it 
is bricks and mortar, rubble and white lead. 
And the writer — I do not say that he must 
be more free from cares than the next man 
— but he must not let into the mint and 
forge of his thought some immaterial and 
petty fact about himself, for this will make 
him self-conscious. Consider how ingenuous, 
how unexpected, how natural is good con- 
versation. At one moment you have nothing 
to say, at the next a vista of ideas has 
opened. They come crowding in, and the 
telling of them reveals new vistas. It is 
the same with the writer. In the process 
of writing the story is made. There is 

99 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

really nothing to say or do in the world 
until you make your start, and then the sig- 
nificance begins to steam out of the mate- 
rials. And here, in the act and heat of 
creation, to have the cold fear thrust in, " I 
cannot use that phrase because the editor 
will think it too strong," is enough to chill 
the brain of Rabelais. Human nature can- 
not stand such handling. Do this to a man 
and you break his spirit. He becomes 
tame, calculating, and ingenious. His 
powers are frozen. 

It is impossible not to see in contem- 
porary journalism a slaughter-house for 
mind. Here we have a great whale that 
browses on the young and eats them by thou- 
sands. This is the seamy side of popular 
education. The low level of the class at 
the dame's school keeps the bright boys 
back and makes dunces of them. 

We have been dealing in all this matter 
with one of the deepest facts of life, to wit, 
the influence that society at large has in 
cutting down and narrowing the develop- 
ment of the individual. The newspaper 
business displays the whole operation very 
vividly; but we may see the same thing 
happening in the other walks of life. There 
arrives a time in the career of most men 

lOO 



LITERATURE 

when their powers become fixed. Men seem 
to expand to definite shapes, like those 
Japanese cuttings that open out into flowers 
and plants when you drop them into warm 
water. After reaching his saturation point 
each man fills his niche in society and 
changes little. He goes on doing whatever 
he was engaged upon at the time he touched 
his limit. 

We almost believe that every man has 
his predestinate size and shape, and that 
some obscure law of growth arrests one man 
at thirty and the next at forty years of age. 
This is partly true; but the law is not 
obscure. It is not because the men stop 
growing that they repeat themselves, but 
they stop growing because they repeat them- 
selves. They cease to experiment; they 
cease to search. The lawyer adopts routine 
methods; the painter follows up his suc- 
cess with an imitation of his success; the 
writer finds a recipe for style or plot. Every 
one saves himself the trouble of re-examin- 
ing the contents of his own mind. He has 
the best possible reason for doing this. 
The public will not pay for his experiments 
as well as it will for his routine work. But 
the laws of nature are deaf to his reasons. 
Research is the price of intellectual growth. 

lOI 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

If you face the problems of life freshly and 
squarely each morning, you march. If you 
accept any solution as good enough, you 
drop. 

For there is no finality and ending place 
to intellect. Examine any bit of politics, 
any law-case, or domestic complication, 
until you understand your own reasons for 
feeling as you do about it. Then write the 
matter down carefully and conclusively, and 
you will find that you have done no more 
than restate the problem in a new form. 
The more complete your exposition, the 
more loudly it calls for new solution. The 
masterly analysis of Tolstoi, his accurate 
explanations, his diagnosis and dissection of 
human life, leave us with a picture of soci- 
ety that for unsolved mystery competes with 
the original. But the point lies here. You 
must lay bare your whole soul in the state- 
ment you make. You must resolutely set 
down everything that touches the matter. 
Until you do this, the question refuses to 
assume its next shape. You cannot flinch 
and qualify in your first book, and speak 
plainly in your second. 

It is the act of utterance that draws out 
the powers in a man and makes him a master 
of his own mind. Without the actual experi- 

I02 



LITERATURE 

ence of writing Lohengrin, Wagner could 
not have discovered Parsifal. The works of 
men who are great enough to get their whole 
thought uttered at each deliverance, form a 
progression like the deductions of a mathe- 
matician. These men are never satisfied 
with a past accomplishment. Their eyes 
are on questions that beckon to them from 
the horizon. Their faculties are replenished 
with new energy because they seek. They 
are driving their ploughs through a sea of 
thought, intent, unresting, resourceful, cre- 
ative. They are discoverers, and just to the 
extent that lesser men are worth anything 
they are discoverers too. 

Beauty and elevation flash from the cur- 
rents set up by intense speculation. Beauty 
is not the aim of the writer. His aim must 
be truth. But beauty and elevation shine 
out of him while he is on the quest. His 
mind is on the problem ; and as he unravels 
it and displays it, he communicates his own 
spirit, as it were incidentally, as it were 
unwittingly, and this is the part that goes 
out from him and does his work in the 
world. 



103 



V 

PRINCIPLES 

Speech is a very small part of human inter- 
course. Indeed speech is often not con- 
nected with the real currents of intercourse. 
A comic actor has made you happy before 
he has uttered a word. This is by the 
responsive vibration of your apparatus to 
his. The external speech and gesture help 
the transfer of power, and that is all they 
do. The communion, upon whatever plane 
of being it takes place, is a contagion, and 
goes forward by leaps and darts, like the 
action of frost on a window-pane. An angry 
friend comes into my room, and before he 
has uttered a word I am in a blaze of 
anger. A baby too young to speak docs 
some naughty thing. I remonstrate with 
him in a rational way. Pcrliaps I repeat to 
him Kant's maxim from the Critique of Prac- 
tical Reason. The child understands at once 
and is grateful for the treatment. Now, ob- 
serve this, that if I said the same thing to a 

104 



PRINCIPLES 

grown man in the same tone, it would be to 
the tone and not to the argument that he 
would respond. 

The exchange of energy between man and 
man is so rapid that language becomes a 
bystander. It is like the passage of the 
electrical current, — we receive an impres- 
sion or a message, or twenty messages at 
once. All this is the result of suggestion 
and inference. No strange phenomenon is 
here alluded to. The situation is the nor- 
mal and constant situation whenever two 
human beings meet. The only mystery 
about it is that our senses should be so 
much more acute than we knew. Ask a 
man to dinner and talk to him about the 
Suez Canal, and the next morning your wife 
will be apt to give a truer account of him 
than you can give. She has been knitting 
in the corner and thinking about the best 
place to buy children's shoes, but she knows 
which coils in her brain have been played 
upon by the brain of the stranger. The 
reason your wife knows that your Suez friend 
is no saint, is that she feels that certain 
strings of the benevolent harp that is sound- 
ing in herself are not being reinforced. 
There are dead notes in him. 

The sensitiveness of children is so com- 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

mon a thing that we forget its explanation. 
It is just because the child cannot follow 
the argument, that he is free from the illu- 
sion that the argument is the main point. 
The lobes of his brain get a shock and re- 
spond to it ingenuously. 

These facts have been neglected by phi- 
losophers, because the facts defy formula- 
tion. You cannot get them into a statement. 
They are life. But in the practical, worka- 
day world, they have always been understood. 
Men of action owe their success to the habit 
of using their minds and bodies in a direct 
way. Men in every profession rely upon the 
accuracy of direct impressions. The great 
doctor, or the great general, or the great 
business man uses the whole of his sensi- 
bilities in each act of reading a man. There 
is no other way to read him correctly. Peo- 
ple whose brains are preoccupied with for- 
mulated knowledge are not apt to be as good 
judges of character as spontaneous persons. 
Their thoughts are on logic. They follow 
what is said. A very small fraction of them 
is alive. They are like chess-players who 
are not listening to the opera. 

The answer to any question in psychology 
always lies under our hand. We have only 
to ask what the normal man does. It will 

io6 



PRINCIPLES 

be found that he uses his faculties according 
to their nature, though it may be, he is 
embryonic and inarticulate. We speak of 
great men as "simple," because they retain 
a sensitiveness to immediate impressions 
very common in uneducated persons and in 
children. Their thought subserves the direct 
currents of suggestion. Their instincts rule 
them. Their minds serve them. They are 
great because of this power to read the 
thoughts of others through the pores of their 
skin, and answer blindfold to unuttered ap- 
peals, whether of weakness or of strength. 
To do this means intellect, whether in 
Napoleon or Gladstone. Every pianist and 
public speaker, every actor and singer knows 
that his whole art consists in getting his 
intellectual apparatus into focus, so that the 
vibrations of his formulated thought shall 
correspond and fall in with the direct and 
spontaneous vibrations of his audience. 
This is truth, this is the discovery of law, 
this is art. 

Men are profound and complicated crea- 
tures, and when any one of them expresses 
the laws of his construction and reveals his 
own natural history, he is called a genius. 
But he is a genius solely because he is 
comprehensible, and others say of him, "I 

107 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

am like that." His suggestions carry. Their 
extreme subtlety baffles analysis, just as the 
suggestions of real life baffle analysis. The 
miracle of reality in art is due to refine- 
ment of suggestion. We cannot follow its 
steps or say how it is done. We see only 
the idea. Shakespeare gives you all the 
meaning, and none of the means. This is 
first-class artificial communication. It al- 
most competes with the every-day, common- 
place, familiar transfer of the incommunicable 
essence of life from man to man. 

Our present problem is, how to influence 
people for their good. It is clear that when 
you and another man meet, the personal 
equation is the controlling thing. If you 
are more high-minded than he, the way to 
influence him is to stick to your own beliefs; 
for they alone can keep you high-minded. 
They alone can make you vibrate. It is 
they and not you that will do the work. 
There you stand, and there he stands; and 
you can only qualify him by the ideas that 
control you. It makes no difference whether 
you are an emperor and he a peasant, or you 
a Good Government Club man and he a mer- 
chant, the same forces are at work. Shift 
your ground, and he feels the shift; you are 
encouraging him to be shifty, like yourself. 

io8 



PRINCIPLES 

What can you do for him except to follow 
your conscience? But this is equally true 
of every meeting of all men everywhere. 
You address a labor meeting and talk about 
the Philippines. You meet the Turkish 
Ambassador and talk about Kipling's poems. 
You talk to your son about kite-flying. To 
each of these contacts with another's mind 
you bring the same power. If you start with 
the psychical value of 6, no matter what you 
do, a cross-section of your whole activity in 
the world will at any instant of time read 6. 
It may be that a page of ciphering cannot 
express the formula, but it will mean 6. 

The immense amount of thought that 
man has given, during the last few thousand 
years, to his social arrangements and his 
destiny, has filled our minds with tangled 
formulas, and has attached our affection to 
particular matters. The pomp of preambles 
and the stress of language stun us. There 
is so much of organized society. There are 
so many good ends. If there were only one 
man in the world, we know that it would be 
impossible to do good to him by suggesting 
evil. We know that if we gave him a hint 
that contained both good and evil, the good 
would do him good, and the evil, evil. If we 
were bent on nothing but benefit, we should 

109 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

have to confine ourselves to suggestions of 
unalloyed virtue. But the world is such a 
tangle of personalities, that we do not hesi- 
tate to mix a little evil in the good we do, 
hoping that the evil will not be operative. 
We half believe that there may, somewhere 
in the community, be a hitch in the multipH- 
cation table that brings out good for evil. 
Liberty and democracy are thought to be 
such worthy ends, that we must obtain them 
by any means and all means, even by hiring 
mercenaries. Can we wonder that in the 
past, men's minds were staggered by the im- 
portance of a papacy or of some dynastic suc- 
cession.'* To-day ever3^body jumps to shield 
vice because it is called republicanism or 
democracy. The irony of history could go 
no further. 

Let us consider our local reforms by the 
light of these views. Civil service laws, 
ballot-reform, elections, taxation, — dissolve 
all these into acts and impulses, and see 
whether the laws of human influence do not 
make a short cut through them all, like 
X-rays. No matter what I talk about to the 
Emperor, I am really conveying to him by 
suggestion a tendency to become as good or 
as bad a man as I myself. Chinese Gordon 
turned a dynamo of personal force upon the 

no 



PRINCIPLES 

Orientals, and they understood him. He 
was talking religion, and he gave it to them 
straight. Now all religion, as everybody 
knows, is purely a matter of suggestion. 
But so is all other intercourse. We want 
honesty. Well, what makes people honest ? 
Honesty. Does anything else spread the 
influence of honesty, except honesty.'' Are 
we here facing a scientific fact? Is this a 
law of the transference of human energy, or 
is it not } If it is, you cannot beat it. You 
cannot imagine any situation where your 
own total force, in favor of honesty, will 
consist of anything else than honesty. Of 
course you may put a case where honesty 
will result in somebody's death. If in that 
case, you want his life, why, lie. But what 
you will get will be his life, not the spread 
of honesty. If the event is chronicled, you 
will find it used as a means of justifying 
dishonesty forever afterwards. 

We do not want any of these reforms 
except as a means of stimulating character, 
and it is a law of nature that character can 
only be stimulated directly. Sincerity is the 
only need, courage the all-sufficing virtue. 
We can dump them into every occasion, and 
sleep sound at night. What interest can 
any rational man have in our municipal 

III 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

issues except as a grindstone on which to 
whet the people's moral sense? How is it 
possible to deceive ourselves into looking 
at our own political activity from any other 
standpoint than this ? You are to make a 
speech at Cooper Union on ballot reform. 
Somebody says, " Do not mention the liquor 
question or you will lose votes." But some 
phase of that question seems to you perti- 
nent and important. Shall you omit and 
submit ^ That would be an odd way of 
stimulating character. The need of the 
times is not ballot laws but sincerity. The 
maximum that any man can do toward 
the spread of sincerity is to display it him- 
self. 

All the virtues spread themselves by 
direct propagation ; and the vices likewise. 
Our people are deficient in righteous indig- 
nation. When you see a man righteously 
indignant, rejoice; this is the seed, this 
the force. Nothing else will arouse courage 
but courage, faith but faith. You see, for 
instance, a knot of men who are really indig- 
nant at the injustice of the times. But 
their indignation seems to you a danger; 
because it is likely to defeat some candi- 
date, some pet measure of yours. You wish 
to allay it. You wish yourself well rid of 

112 



PRINCIPLES 

this sacred indignation ; it is inconvenient. 
Open your eyes to the light of science. 
Here is a spark of that fire with which 
everybody ought to be filled. All your 
scheming was only for the purpose of get- 
ting this fire. Then foment it. 

Virtue then, is a mode of motion, or it is 
an attitude of mind in a human organism, 
which enables that organism to transmit 
virtue to others. But vice is also a mere 
attitude of mind by which vice is trans- 
mitted. We know less about the natural 
history of vice than we do of dipsomania 
and consumption ; but we know this much, 
that the vices are co-related, and breed one 
another in . transitu; the tendency being 
towards lighter forms in the later catchers. 
Avoid another's guilty side, and you rein- 
force it ; sympathize with it, and you catch 
his disease, or some disease. I have held 
hands with my friend (who is in the wrong) 
over his family troubles, and it has given 
me the distemper for a week. The German 
actor, Devrient, went mad while studying 
the inmates of asylums, as a preparation to 
playing King Lear. It was not the liv- 
ing in asylums that drove him mad, but 
his sympathetic attitude toward the disease. 
This exposed him. Why is it we commend 
8 113 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

the man whose antagonism to crooked work 
is so great that he shows a tempter the door 
before he has finished his proposition ? Par- 
leying is not only a danger; it is the begin- 
ning of the trouble itself. 

It is very difficult and very odious offend- 
ing people, by forcing them to see in which 
direction our wheels really go round; and 
yet the alternative is to have our machinery 
forced back to a standstill. We are inter- 
locked with other people and cannot break 
free. We are held in place by fate, and 
played upon against our will. When you 
see cruelty going on before you, you are put 
to the alternative of interposing to stop it, or 
of losing your sensibility. There is a law 
of growth here involved. It is inexorable. 
You are at the mercy of it. You wish your- 
self elsewhere, but you are here; you are sl 
mere illustration of pitiless and undying 
force. The part you take, may run through 
a fit of bad temper or malice. It m„ay turn 
to covetousness or conceit, who can tell? 
Some poison has entered your eye because 
you looked negligently upon corruption. It 
will cost you some part of your sense of 
smell. "Use or lose," says Nature when 
she gives us capacities. What you condone, 
you support ; what you neglect, you confirm. 

114 



PRINCIPLES 

It is true that your confirmation and sup- 
port are managed through the mechanism of 
blindness. All the evil in the world re- 
ceives its chief support from the people 
whose only connection with it is that they 
do not fight it, nor see it. Where politics is 
involved scarcely a man in America knows 
the difference between right and wrong. 
Our mayoralty contest five years ago would 
have left Lot searching for a man who could 
tell black from white. It was a clear moral 
issue. But it arose in politics: we could 
not see it. That we have intellectual 
cataract is entirely due to the habit of con- 
doning embezzlement. It is a secondary 
form of the endemic theft, caught by the 
by-standers. The best people in town had 
it. If they had been lifting their hands 
against theft during the preceding years, 
they never would have caught it. 

Of course we support all the good in the 
world, as well as all the evil ; and the ratio 
in which we do both changes at every 
moment. It radiates forth from us, and is 
read correctly by every baby as he passes in 
his perambulator. Close thinking, and fresh 
observation of things too familiar to be 
noticed, bring us to this point. 

Now, just as no complexity of institutions 
115 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

affects the transfer of virtue, so none affects 
the transfer and propagation of vice. Yes- 
terday you were all for virtue. You were 
for leading a revolution against the bosses, 
and were ready to work and subscribe and 
vote. You were a man with the heart of a 
man. But to-day you are chop-fallen. "The 
thing cannot be done. It is not the year." 
The degradation of your character is seen in 
your low spirits, and in the jaded and sophis- 
tical commonplaces you pour forth. I know 
the academical reasons for this change in 
you. I can express it in terms of ballot-law 
and civil -service. But what is it that really 
has happened ? 

The power that has struck you was focal- 
ized the day before yesterday in the office 
of some law-broking politicians; and the 
direct rays of base passion have struck 
straight through stone walls and constitu- 
tions, and, falling upon you, have stopped 
your wheels. In them it was avarice and 
ambition. In you it is doubt. A drowsy 
inertia overcomes you, a blindness of the 
will. That is what has really happened. 
The rest is illusion and metaphysical talk. 
See, now, the real curse of injustice; it 
takes away the sight from the eyes, and 
that in a night. 

ii6 



PRINCIPLES 

Is it not perfectly natural that Tammany 
Hall should be everywhere, at all tables, in 
all churches, in all consciences, when these 
electrical currents run between man and 
man and connect them so easily? 

I read in the newspaper that a well-known 
man is at Albany in the interests of a gas 
deal. He cannot get his way in the city, and 
is putting up a job with the legislature. I 
see the thing going through, — a thing 
utterly cynical, utterly corrupt. No paper 
will explain it because it cannot be ex- 
plained without names; besides, the names 
own the papers. Everybody understands it ; 
nobody minds it. Is any statute here at 
fault.-* Will any legislation cure this.^ If 
the moral sensibility of our people should 
become tensified by twenty per cent in 
twenty-four hours, twenty per cent of all our 
iniquities in every department would cease 
in forty-eight hours. Government is carried 
on by the lightning of personal suggestion 
which flashes through the community from 
day to day and from moment to moment. 
Those things are done which are demanded 
or are tolerated at the instant they are done. 

I read in a newspaper that a syndicate has 
been formed to light the city. It is backed 
by the men who control the city administra- 

117 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

tion, and they are now blackmailing the 
existing company to its ruin. Can I escape 
the knowledge of this thing? Alas, too 
easily : I own stock in it. 

At first we think the legislature makes the 
laws, then we see it is done by a cabal, then 
by people behind the cabal, finally by the 
million bonds of popular prejudice which tie 
each man up with the times. 

Look closely, take some particular man, 
and consider why it is that he does not spend 
his whole time in fighting for virtue. It 
will turn out, that in some form or other, he 
is a beneficiary of these evils, and has not 
the energy to fight them. One man depends 
upon the status quo for his living, the next 
is held by affection for his friends, by the 
ties of old prejudice, by inertia, by hope- 
lessness. Which of them is the more deeply 
injured victim of tyranny, — the active self- 
seeker or the listless man, the Tammany boy 
or the American gentleman t 

Every man bears a direct and discoverable 
share in the responsibility. A janitor keeps 
his place through Tammany influence, a 
young lawyer gets business by keeping his 
mouth shut. Follow out the lines leading 
from any man, no matter how obscure he is, 
and they will lead you to the ante-chamber 

ii8 



PRINCIPLES 

where gigantic business has its offices, where 
the highest functionaries of commerce and 
politics meet. The business world is all 
one organization. It is a sort of secret 
society, a great web. No matter where you 
touch it, the same spiders come out. 

The boss system, then, appears as the 
visible part of all the private selfishness in 
America. It is a great religion of self- 
interest, with its hierarchy, its chapels, its 
propaganda, and its confessors in every home. 
You yourself support it. I saw last week, at 
your table, a magnate whose business conduct 
you deplore, and to-day I heard a young 
man make the comment, that there was no 
use fighting the current so long as social 
influence could be bought. Do not accuse 
Tammany Hall ; you yourself have corrupted 
that young man. So long as you think you 
can circumvent the laws of force, you will 
remain a pillar in the temple of iniquity. 

But look closer still at each of those indi- 
viduals, and see just what it is he is giving 
as the purchase money. One man gives 
^25,000 to pay a president's private debts, 
and goes as minister to England; another 
gives merely his name to indorse a doubtful 
candidate for the assembly, and receives 
prospective good will from the organization. 

119 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

What is this great market overt where every 
one can get what he wants ? The syndicate 
can get the franchises, and the aldermen 
the cash. No one is too small to be served, 
or so great as to require nothing. Upon 
what principle is this monstrous bazaar, 
this clearing-house for self-interest, con- 
ducted ? It is as large as the United States — 
the transcontinental railroads use it — and so 
well managed that I can get my friend a job 
as the secretary of a reform movement. 
What is it that makes this universal shop 
run so smoothly? It is hooked together 
simply on business principles. The price 
you pay is always the rubbing of somebody 
the right way; the thing you get is advance- 
ment or personal comfort of some sort. It 
has happened, that by the operation of com- 
mercial forces, the whole of America's 
seventy million people have been polarized 
into self-seekers; and our total condition is 
visibly Vanity Fair. You can actually fol- 
low the rays of power from the individual to 
the boss. All the evil in the world is seen 
to be in league. Embezzlement and lazi- 
ness, selfish ambition and prejudice, cruelty 
and timidity here openly play into each 
other's hands, support and console each 
other. Nay, every atom of vice, every im- 

I20 



PRINCIPLES 

pulse of malice or cupidity, can be shown up 
as a tendon or a sinew of the great organiza- 
tion of selfish forces. It is as if a magic 
glass had been superposed upon the conti- 
nent, and, looking down through it, upon 
the motives of men, all complexity vanished, 
and we saw all the evil forces pulling one 
way. 

The same thing has always been true in 
every society; but the names, powers, super- 
stitions have been so extremely complicated 
that no one could follow the laws of inter- 
locking motive, except by inference and 
prophetic insight. Take the case of a very 
selfish man fighting his way up through 
society in the reign of Louis XVIII. He 
meets a Bourbon influence, an ecclesiastical 
influence, a Napoleonic influence, a republi- 
can influence. He grapples with every man 
he meets, using the hooks of self-interest in 
that man. The forces at work under Louis 
XVIII. were as simple as with us. Only 
the nomenclature is different, and more com- 
plex. It is easy in America to see the work- 
ing of one man's selfishness upon another's. 
Let alone the market overt, it is easy to 
trace the subtle social relations, when they 
are for the bad. It was easy to follow the 
effect of your conduct in asking the dis- 

121 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

honest business magnate to dinner, because 
the young man spoke of it. He was shocked 
and injured. But we also found out by the 
episode that before you did the thing, you 
were really a factor for good in his life, 
holding up his conscience and his ideals. 

The inexpressible subtlety in the mecha- 
nism of man makes the transmission of the 
force for good as easy as that of the force 
for evil. They are of the same character, 
and very often flow through the same chan- 
nels. There is no more mystery in the one 
case than in the other. 

Consider what is done in the course of 
any practical movement for reform. A 
bad bill is pending at Albany. In order 
to beat it, a party of men whose char- 
acters are trusted, get on a train, and the 
whole State watches them proceed to Albany. 
This is often enough to defeat a measure. 
The good their pilgrimage does, is done then 
and there instantly, by example, by sugges- 
tion. If, when they get to Albany, they sell 
out their cause, the harm they do is done 
then and there by example, by suggestion. 
They make some concession which lessens 
friction but suggests Tammany Hall. This 
is the only part of the transaction that 
reaches the great public. Ask the laboring 

122 



PRINCIPLES 

man and he will give you a digest of the 
whole episode in a shrug. If a reform can- 
didate is running on the platform "Thou 
shalt not steal," and the boss desires to cor-^ 
rupt him, the boss asks him to drop in for a 
chat. If he goes, every one hears of it the 
next day, and every one is a little corrupted 
himself. A thousand well-meaning men say 
he did right. Had he resisted, these same 
men would have cried " Bravo ! " and there- 
after taken a higher view of human nature. 
It is by a succession of such minute shocks 
of good or bad example that communities are 
affected. The truth seems to be that our 
lives are ruled by laws of influence which 
are in themselves exceedingly direct. But 
the operation of them is concealed from us 
by our preoccupation over details. 

It is impossible to regard these matters in 
too simple a light. Nothing is ever in- 
volved except the contagious impulse that 
makes one man yawn when he sees another 
man yawn. Both the good and the evil in 
the world run upon the winds. Moses' 
habit of falling upon his face before the 
congregation, and calling God to witness 
that he could lead them no longer, was not 
a political trick done to frighten the people 
into submission by the threat of abandoning 

123 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

them. It was a sincere act of devotion ; but 
it was also the most powerful form of appeal. 
He did the act; they followed in it, and thus 
made him absolute. Lincoln's anecdotes 
and fables consisted of nothing but sugges- 
tion. They were one source of his power. 
The first thing a tyrant does is to suppress 
cartoons. Here we have something that is 
often sheer pantomime, and yet it is one of 
the most effective vehicles in the world. It 
was the only thing Piatt could not stand. 
Within two years he has tried to stop it by 
legislation. 

If you are to reach masses of people in 
this world, you must do it by a sign language. 
Whether your vehicle be commerce, litera- 
ture, or politics, you can do nothing but 
raise signals, and make motions to the 
people. In literature this is obvious. The 
more far-reaching any truth is, the shorter 
grow its hieroglyphics. The great truths 
can only be given in hints, phrases, and 
parables. They lie in universal experience, 
and any comment belittles them. They are 
like the magnetic poles that can only be 
pointed out with a needle. Take any pro- 
found saying about life, and see if it does 
not imply short-hand, a sort of telegraphy 
as the ordinary means of communication be- 

124 



PRINCIPLES 

tween men. " He that loseth his Hfe shall 
save it." Here we have a poem, a system of 
ethics and a psychology. Or take any bit 
of worldly wisdom, " Money talks." Here we 
have the whole philosophy of materialism. 
Does any one imagine that political bar- 
gains are reduced to writing.'' It would be 
injurious to the conscience. They are made 
by the merest hints on all sides. Every one 
is left free. 

The extreme case of the power of sugges- 
tion is seen in the stock-market, where a 
rumor that Banker A has dined with Rail- 
road President B drives values up or down. 
Cleveland's Venezuela message makes a 
panic. The different parts of the financial 
world live, from day to day, in instantaneous 
and throbbing communication. This is one 
side of the popular life. Its thermometer 
is sensitive, and records one thousandth of 
a degree as readily as the political ther- 
mometer records a single degree. But the 
principle is the same. All the people run 
the stock-market, and all the people run 
politics. There has never been any diffi- 
culty in reaching the whole people with 
ideas. Even a private man can do it. But 
he must act them out. 



125 



VI 

PRINCIPLES {continued). 

Suppose a small child steals jam in the 
pantry. So long as he pretends that he did 
not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he 
suffers a certain oppression. 

You can explain to an intelligent child 
that if he tells the whole truth about the 
thing, the telling will cost him pain and 
leave him happy. But you cannot save him 
the pain. So long as he persists in lying, 
some of his faculties lie under an inhibition; 
the vital energies flow past them instead of 
through them. The first shock of a through 
passage gives a spasm of pain, and then the 
child is happy. It is one of the facts of the 
world that moral awakening is accompanied 
by pain. 

The quarrel that the world has with its 
agitators is that they do really agitate. 
People express this by saying that the men 
are dangerous or have bad taste. The epi- 
thets vary with the age. They are intended 

126 



PRINCIPLES 

to excite public contempt, and they embody 
the aversions of society. In a martial age 
the reformer is called a molly-coddle; in a 
commercial age an incompetent, a disturber 
of values ; in a fanatical age, a heretic. If 
an agitator is not reviled, he is a quack. 

These epithets are mere figures of speech. 
What they really express is suffering caused 
by the workings of conscience. And so 
in any educational movement that runs 
across the country, there is always a track 
of pain turning to happiness. When we 
get in the path of one of these things, 
we find that the division between con- 
tending ideas passes through the individual 
man. It does not fall between men. The 
struggle is always the struggle of forces 
within an individual. A is trying to con- 
vince B. The struggle in A's mind is to 
make the matter clear, in B's m.ind to make 
the opposite clear. In the course of time 
one view prevails ; but the struggle continues, 
for B occupies A's position and is now strug- 
gling to convince C. It is in this way that 
a movement runs through a community. 
The firing line passes through a series of in- 
dividuals, and as they succumb, through them 
to the next. 

If you take any particular case of conflict, 
127 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

you will find that the man is divided be- 
tween two courses, one of which is dis- 
agreeable because it • involves effort and 
sacrifice and offence. The other is agree- 
able because it involves personal ease or 
personal advancement. The two motives in 
man result from the structure of his brain, 
whose operations we are obliged to accept : 
we cannot amend them; they are the facts 
of psychology. 

It would seem as if the brain of man were 
so constituted that at the moment of its 
full operation the man himself disappears. 
His consciousness becomes wholly occupied 
with impersonal interests. Thus, in the 
process of thought, a man begins to see his 
own personal interests threatened. If he 
continues to think, they must vanish. This 
is the struggle between right and wrong. It 
is really a struggle between two attitudes of 
mind. It is the experience we suffer when 
the mind is passing from the self-regardant 
to the non-self-regardant attitude. 

Perhaps the discomfort of doing one's duty 
is an inseparable incident of the storage of 
energy, and the pleasure of neglecting one's 
duty, an incident of the leakage of energy. 
When I get up and poke the fire, because I 
see it will go out if I don't, I return to my 

128 



PRINCIPLES 

chair a more energetic being than I was the 
moment before. At any rate, our oscilla- 
tion between two states of consciousness has 
preoccupied mankind from the earliest times, 
and has given rise to all the dualistic phi- 
losophies. The great fact as to the reality 
of the struggle is proved to us, not merely 
by our own consciousness, but because we 
can see the logical results of it everywhere 
in society. 

A community is a collection of palpitating 
animals. Each of us is one of them, and 
each of us receives and transmits millions 
of impressions hourly. We get heard. We 
have our exact weight and force. There is 
no difficulty about our power of intercourse. 
Indeed it is the thing we cannot get away 
from. No man walks by himself. Between 
his feet and the ground are invisible pedals 
that play upon, and are played upon by other 
men. You cannot live or move except by 
transmitting influence. The whole of prac- 
tical life is made up of contact with the pas- 
sions of others. A lawyer or a broker is 
like an engineer who sits behind his ma- 
chine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. 
A trader, a writer, or a philanthropist, a 
laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but 
open and shut valves in other people. There 
9 129 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

is no other way of serving your fellows; 
there is no other way of earning your living 
or of wasting your substance. 

We saw that in politics it was impossible 
to draw a dividing line anywhere in that 
series of men whose joint activity and in- 
activity held up what we call the evils of 
politics. Money interest shaded off into 
prejudice, and that into mistaken loyalty, 
and that into indifference. The striking 
truth about the whole series was that it 
showed different shades of selfishness, lack 
of energy, and inability to use the mind 
accurately. So also any unselfish or accu- 
rate use of his mind by the laborer or by the 
journalist was, as we saw, apt to throw him 
out of employment. 

In politics and in morals, all that we con- 
demn, turns out on inspection to be mere 
selfishness. But anything in the world that 
we dislike, turns out, on inspection, to be 
self-regardant effort or avoidance of effort. 
Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the 
pot-boiler, or the refined laziness of preju- 
dice, or the mere weakness that was unable 
to see the world for itself, and has been 
forced to see it with some one else's eyes. 
It is a makeshift. So of bad carpentry or 
bad cooking. There is no such special prov- 

130 



PRINCIPLES 

ince in life as morality. Each man regards 
that thing as immoral which he sees to be 
selfish. A proofreader will show the same 
indignation over a careless job, that a musi- 
cian shows over a weak phrasing. 

The unimaginable subtlety of our compre- 
hension enables us to detect selfishness in 
arts of whose methods we know nothing; 
we read it like large print. To speak accu- 
rately, all we get from any communication 
is a transcript, an image, a picture of the 
author's thought, the jar of intellect and 
character. Is it supposed that communica- 
tion between men goes forward by ratiocina- 
tion, or that education is a thing taken in 
by linear measurement.? Thought cannot 
creep, but only fly. It proceeds by the magic 
of stimulation. A good judge can read a 
good brief almost as fast as he can turn the 
pages. If a thing is well put, it is almost 
our own before it is said. Ideas pass into 
us so quickly that Plato thought we knew 
them in a former existence. This is due to 
the subtlety of our apprehension. We are 
not satisfied except by an appeal so refined 
that our only sensation is one of being made 
more alive. " Rien ne me choque " was 
Chopin's highest praise. What wonder, 
then, that we resent the self-sufficiency of 

131 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

any inferior mind ? The whole of life is no 
more than a series of pulsations, and all the 
books and Bibles, sign-boards, music-boxes, 
and telegraph wires are the machinery by 
which in one way or another the mind of 
man touches the mind of man. The world 
has been going on for so long that we have 
many such devices, and out of the millions 
that have been made, all but the very best get 
discarded as old lumber. These things are 
the language of the unselfish force upon the 
globe. It is much nearer truth to think of 
them as a single influence than as multi- 
farious. Their origin and tendency, their 
practical utility, the veneration in which 
they are held, bind them together and make 
them one. For the world values the seer 
above all men, and has always done so. 
Nay, it values all men in proportion as they 
partake of the character of seers. The Elgin 
Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are 
valued for the same reason. What we feel 
in them is a painstaking submission to facts 
beyond the author's control, and to ideas 
imposed upon him by his vision. So 
with Beethoven's Symphonies, with Adam 
Smith's "Wealth of Nations," — with any 
conceivable output of the human mind of 
which you approve. You love them because 

132 



PRINCIPLES 

you say, " These things were not made, they 
were seen. " 

Thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon 
the globe are cumulative. The dead heroes 
fight on forever, and the dead mathemati- 
cians expound forever. It is true that the 
organization of the selfish forces is over- 
whelmingly visible, and that of the unselfish 
ones invisible. Napoleon is seen by his 
contemporaries; Spinoza is not seen. The 
reason is simple. The man who wants 
something must have an office address. But 
the man who wants nothing for himself, but 
spends his whole time in so using his mind 
that he himself disappears, lives only as an 
influence in the minds of others. He is a 
song, a theory, a proposition in algebra. 
These two conflicting forms of force are then 
flashed up and down, forward and back 
ceaselessly, through and across every social 
meeting, through and across society. The 
novelists and playwrights deal with this 
instantaneous interplay of motive; and the 
time-honored analysis of self for self on the 
villain's side, and sacrifice for principle on 
the hero's side is a true thing. It is a fair 
abstract of the world. 

You can illustrate in an instant the imme- 
diacy of these two hierarchies of power under 

133 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

which we live and from which we cannot 
escape. The selfish ones need not be named ; 
they oppress us. But the unselfish ones are 
equally near. If you take any bit of poetry 
or speech or writing that you consider great, 
and examine it, you will find that it illus- 
trates the logical coherence of all the ideas 
and feelings that make you happy; it is a 
digest of a law of influence. Or conversely, 
if you set about to illustrate some experi- 
ence, and if you can get it profoundly and 
accurately stated as what you believe to be 
the bottom truth, it will turn under your 
hands into something familiar. If you are 
successful, it will be a kind of poetry. 



134 



VII 

CONCLUSION 

There is force enough in ordinary sunshine 
to turn all the mills in the world; and there 
is beneficent energy enough in any com- 
munity to make the people perfectly happy. 
But it is cramped and deflected, poisoned 
by misuse, and turned to hateful ends. The 
question is how to liberate energy. 

People are fond of thinking the millennium 
is impossible; but so long as happiness is 
dependent on a right use of the faculties, 
there is no reason why the millennium should 
not be reached, and that soon or unexpect- 
edly. We all know individuals so harmoni- 
ously framed that we say, "If theirs were 
the common temper of mankind, we should 
be happy." None of the externals of life, 
about which there is so much buffeting, con- 
trol the question. Happiness is in a nut- 
shell. Anybody can have it. You are 
happy if you get out of bed on the right side. 
I can never stop wondering at the awful 

135 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

simplicity of the principle on which mankind 
is constructed. Little Alice in the Looking- 
Glass could not reach the porch till she 
turned her back on it and walked straight 
into the door. Renounce the search for 
happiness and you find the substance. There 
is nothing else in the law and the prophets. 

We see most men like tee-totums spinning 
to the left and leading a dismal life. How 
shall we get their motive power to spin them 
to the right, and make them happy .'^ The 
practical question is : how to use the power 
of sunlight to turn our mills. How can we 
hold up a prism to the times that shall dis- 
integrate these rays of complex force, and 
then adjust a lens that shall focus the powers 
of good and make them turn the wheels of 
society.? The elements are before us, cease- 
lessly in motion. iravra pet The most 
adamantine institutions are cloud palaces. 
There is no stability anywhere ; and if you 
have a steady eye you will see that the whole 
fabric is in a flux. Nor are the changes 
arbitrary. The formations and re-forma- 
tions are governed by laws as certain as 
those of astronomy. Study the changes and 
you will find the laws. Subserve the laws 
and you can affect the formations. Julius 
Csesar did no more. 

136 



CONCLUSION 

The strands of prejudice and passion that 
bind people together pulsate with life. All 
these fellow-citizens are human beings, and 
there is no one of them whom we cannot 
understand, reach, influence. The ordinary 
modes of intercourse are at hand. Chief 
among them you find the great machinery of 
government. It dwarfs every other agency, 
whether for good or ill. In America this 
machinery was designed to be at the service 
of anybody. It is an advertising agency for 
ideas, and it is very much more than this; 
since the fact that a man is to vote forces 
him to think. You may preach to a congre- 
gation by the year and not affect its thought 
because it is not called upon for definite 
action. But throw your subject into a cam- 
paign and it becomes a challenge. You can 
get assent to almost any proposition so long 
as you are not going to do anything about it. 
And on the other hand, no amount of verbal 
proof will justify a new thought until it has 
been put in practice. 

Alas for ink and paper ! There is in all 
speech and writing a conventional presump- 
tion that human beings shall be logical, or 
fixed quantities, or at least coherent crea- 
tures. For the purposes of an essay or a 
speech, you prove your case, and carry weight 

137 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

accordingly. If you are very cogent and 
conclusive, why, you win. Hurrah ! the 
world is saved. But in real life there are no 
fixed quantities; all the terms are variables. 

For example, everybody understands what 
is meant by the " Moral Law. " People 
differ only as to the application of that law. 
Not long ago I heard a sermon on this law, 
in which great stress was laid on the fact that 
it was a discovered law whereby the truth 
prevailed. Any truce with evil meant defeat 
for the cause of righteousness. This was 
the law of God, tested by experience, and in 
constant operation like the law of gravity, a 
thing you could not escape. The preacher 
pictured the solitary struggle of the great 
man seeking truth, his proclamation of the 
truth, the refusal of the world to receive it, 
and the prophet's isolation and apparent 
failure. Nevertheless what the prophet said 
had always the same content. It was an 
appeal to the instincts of man upon the ques- 
tion of right and wrong, and in the end it 
was accepted. 

Now the man who made this exposition, 
and it was admirable, is in regard to politics 
a believer in compromise. I think I have 
never known him support the idealist cause 
in a campaign ; and upon most occasions of 

138 



CONCLUSION 

crisis he is found heartily throwing stones 
at the crusaders. 

What words in any language can make 
this man understand that his law — which he 
really does profoundly understand as a law 
— applies to reform movements? Why, no 
words will do it, only example. New state- 
ments about morality, however eloquent, add 
nothing to our knowledge. Everything is 
known about the moral law, except how 
you yourself will act under given circum- 
stances. You have nothing but example to 
contribute. 

People interrogate force. They are un- 
convinced, and are carried, still protesting, 
through the air and deposited in a new place. 
And then, thereafter, they agree with you 
about the whole matter. Mere intellec- 
tual assent to your proposition is, even when 
you can get it, worth nothing. Your object 
is not to confute, but to stimulate. What 
you really want is that every man you meet 
shall drop his business and devote his entire 
life and energy to your cause. You will 
accept nothing less than this. Is it not clear 
that people are not moved by logic ? Your 
conduct must ultimately square with reason 
and be justified by the laws of the universe 
and the constitution of other people's minds; 

^39 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

but you must value only that approval which 
comes from the deeper fibres in men. You 
need not be concerned about the bickerings 
of contemporary misunderstanding. Leave 
these for the historical society. Act first 
— explain afterwards. That is the way to 
get heard. Must you show your passport 
and certificate of birth and legitimacy to 
every editor and every lackey ? They '11 find 
out who you are by and by. It is easier to 
knock a man down than to say why you do 
it. The act is sometimes needed, and wis- 
dom then approves it after the event. Peo- 
ple who love soft methods and hate iniquity 
forget this, — that reform consists in taking 
a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not 
do it. 

Such are the practical dictates of agitation. 
Their justification lies always with events. 
It may be that you must wait seven centuries 
for an audience, or it may be that in two 
years your voice will be heeded. If you are 
really a forerunner of better times, the times 
will appear and explain you. It will then 
turn out that your movement was the key- 
note of the national life. You really differed 
from your neighbors only in this, — that 
your mind had gone faster than theirs along 
the road all were travelling. 

140 



CONCLUSION 

We are all slaves of the age ; we can only 
see such principles as society reveals. The 
philosophy of other ages does us little good. 
We repeat the old formulas and cry up the 
prophets; but we see no connection between 
the truth we know so well in print and its 
counterpart in real life. The moral com- 
monplaces, as, for instance, " Honesty is the 
best policy," "A single just man can influ- 
ence an entire community," "Never compro- 
mise a principle," are social truths. They 
are always true, but they are only obviously 
true in very virtuous communities. In a 
vile community the influence of a just man 
is potent but not visible. In a perfectly 
virtuous era it is clear that a cheat could not 
drive a fraudulent trade. 

A seer is a man with such sharp eyes for 
cause and effect that he sees social truth, 
even under unfavorable conditions. And 
yet even the seers generally had auspicious 
weather, — that is to say, storms of moral 
passion. The whole race of Jews lived in 
fervent exaltation for generations, and re- 
vealed to their sharp-sighted prophets deep 
glimpses of social truth. Hence the Bible. 
"A prophet is not without honor save in 
his own country." What happy precision! 
What sound generalization ! But every town- 

141 



,"!,- 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

ship in Israel had its prophet, and the truth 
was a commonplace. 

All the world's moral wisdom would turn 
into literal truth upon the regeneration of 
society. It tends to become obvious in 
regenerative eras. In dark ages it becomes 
paradox. Standards are multiplied, and 
makeshift theories come in, — one rule for 
social conduct, another for business, another 
for politics. Expedient supplants principle. 
Indeed you may gauge the degradation of an 
age by the multiplicity of its standards. It 
is the same with the fine arts. To the men 
that made the statues and the pictures, 
these things were the shortest symbols of 
truth, and required no explanation. In the 
dark ages that followed they became a mys- 
tery and a paradox. But the traditions and 
objects survived and had to be accounted for. 
An age that cannot produce them requires a 
philosophy of aesthetics. Thus a thousand 
reasons are given to explain their existence, 
and finally it is agreed that they are some- 
thing superfluous and fictitious, — conven- 
tional lies, like poetry, like loving your 
neighbor. 

Nothing but a general increase of interest 
in the aspect of common things would ex- 
plain to us the great masters. A revival of 

142 



CONCLUSION 

interest in the way the world looks is the 
precursor of painting: the perceptions of 
every one are quickening. And so we may 
be sure that we are upon the edge of a 
better era when the old moral commonplaces 
begin to glow like jewels and the stones to 
testify. 

You cannot expect any one but a scientist 
to be startled at the movement of a glacier. 
But if you distribute a few micrometric in- 
struments upon that gloomy ice-field, the 
American civic consciousness, and if you 
take observations not oftener than once in 
three years, you will be startled. The direc- 
tion of the general movement is absolutely 
right. But it all moves together. Special 
signs of progress imply general progress, 
and hence comes the extraordinary and sci- 
entific interest in the awakening of this com- 
munity. It is like a man lapsed into the 
deepest coma who is beginning to stir. 
Watch him, take his pulse, surround him 
with every apparatus of experimental physi- 
ology, and you will find the laws of health, 
the norm of progress. 

Art and literature, and that moral atmos- 
phere which makes a society worth moving 
in, lie on the other side of the great reac- 
tion, the spiritual revival which we see 

143 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

now faintly beginning; and it is because 
these things can be got at only by stimu- 
lating American character that these re- 
form movements are of value. Here at 
least the circulation throbs. Political re- 
form — that is to say, a political life in 
which men who are personally honest pre- 
dominate, a politics run by ideas — will 
come in as fast as the public develops ideas, 
and not before. But an idea is something 
very different from what you who read this 
think it is. An idea is a thing that governs 
your conduct all the time. For instance, 
you assent to the notion of independence 
in politics; you understand the lost-cause 
theory, but you won't vote the ticket. 
Why.? You don't want to get out of your 
class. The relations between thought and 
action in you are not normal. Half of your 
brain has never functioned, and the paralysis 
shows in your politics. You have no idea. 
It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals 
or makes books or music. What passes for 
political thought in your vocabulary is like 
the phantasma in the brain of the Indian 
priest who is buried with the corn growing 
above him. The average educated man in 
America has about as much knowledge of 
what a political idea is as he has of the 

144 



CONCLUSION 

principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing 
used in politics or music which those fellows 
who practise politics or music manipulate 
somehow. Show him one and he will deny 
that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt 
or he will not recognize it. He has only 
seen dried figs. He has only thought dried 
thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is 
against the rules of his mind. 

Imagine a tea-party of pre-Raphaelites 
discussing Dante; they dote on his style, 
his passion, his force, his quality. In walks 
Dante, grim, remorseless, harsh, powerful. 
The man represents everything they hate. 
He is a horror and an outrage. The whole 
region of literature that these men live in 
is not more fictitious than the region of 
political thought in which the effete Amer- 
ican — I mean your banker, your college 
president, your writer of editorial leaders — 
lives. Exclude for the moment those who 
are financially corrupt and consider only the 
men of intellect, and in all that concerns 
politics they are as removed from real ideas 
as Rossetti was removed from the real Dante. 

Imagine a company of people on a voyage. 
They play whist with one another for dimes, 
and they spend all their money on the stew- 
ard and continue to play with counters, and 
^° 145 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

the ship goes to wreck, and they sit on the 
beach and continue to play with pebbles. 
That is American politics. The whole 
thing is one gigantic sham, one transcendent 
fraud. 

It makes no difference which man is made 
president; it makes no difference which is 
governor. There is no choice between 
McKinley and Bryan, between Republican- 
ism and Democracy. There is no difference 
between them. They are one thing. They 
both and all of them are part of the machinery 
by which the government of a most dishonest 
nation is carried on, for the financial benefit 
of certain parties, — certain thousands of 
men who have bank accounts and eat and 
drink and bring up their families on the 
proceeds of this complicated swindle. 

There is no reality in a single phrase 
uttered in politics, no meaning in one single 
word of any of it. There is no man in public 
life who stands for anything. They are 
shadows ; they are phantasmagoria. At best 
they cater to the better elements ; at worst 
they frankly subserve the worst. There is 
no one who stands for his own ideas himself, 
by himself, a man. If American politics 
does not look to you like a joke, a tragic 
dance; if you have enough blindness left in 

146 



CONCLUSION 

you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for 
the Democratic party or the Republican 
party (for at present machine and party are 
one), or for any candidate^ who does not stand 
for a new era, — then you yourself pass into 
the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an 
exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the 
American soil. You are part of the problem, 
and you must be educated and drawn for- 
ward towards real life. This process is 
going on. As the community returns to 
life, it sees the natural world for a moment 
and then forgets it. The blood flushes the 
brain and then recedes You yourself voted 
once against both parties, when you thought 
you could win, and when you were excited. 
You quoted Isaiah and I know not what 
poetry, and were out and out committed to 
principle ; but to-day you are cold and hope- 
less. At present, hope is a mystery to you. 
Nevertheless the utility of those early reform 
movements survives. They heated the imag- 
ination of the people till the people had a 
momentary vision of truths which not all of 
them forgot ; and so each year the tempera- 
ture has been higher, the mind of the com- 
munity clearer. 

We must not regard those broken reeds, 
the renegade leaders of reform movements, 

147 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

as villains; though the mere record of their 
words and conduct might prove them such. 
They have been men emerging from a mist. 
They see clearly for a moment, and then 
clouds sweep before them. Vanity, selfish- 
ness, ambition, tradition, habit, intervene 
like a fog. They have been betrayed, too, 
by the fickle public, that would not stand by 
them when in trouble. In the recapture of 
any institution by the forces of honesty there 
are trenches that get filled by slaughtered 
honor. 

This whole revolution means the invasion 
of politics by new men. At first they are 
tyros, unstable, untried, well-meaning fel- 
lows. Half of them crack in the baking. 
But there are more coming, and the fibre is 
growing tougher and the eyes clearer; soon 
we shall have men. A great passion is soon 
to replace the feeble conscientious motive 
that has hitherto brought the new men for- 
ward : ambition, — the ambition to stand for 
ideas, for ideas only, and to get heard. We 
have almost forgotten that public life is the 
natural ambition of every young man. Con- 
ditions have made it contemptible. But 
these struggles signify that a change in 
those conditions has already begun. Your 
work and mine may be summed up in one 

148 



CONCLUSION 

word. Make it possible for a young man to 
go into public life untarnished, and as an 
enemy to every extant evil. You must have 
men who will not go except on these terms. 
The times herald such men. They will 
appear. We must prepare for them. 

The reason for the slow progress of the 
world seems to lie in a single fact. Every 
man is born under the yoke, and grows up 
beneath the oppressions of his age. He can 
only get a vision of the unselfish forces in 
the world by appealing to them, and every 
appeal is a call to arms. If he fights he 
must fight, not one man, but a conspiracy. 
He is always at war with a civilization. On 
his side is proverbial philosophy, a galaxy 
of invisible saints and sages, and the half- 
developed consciousness and professions of 
everybody. Against him is the world, and 
every selfish passion in his own heart. The 
instant he declares war, every inducement is 
offered to make him stop. "Toil, envy, 
want, the patron, and the jail " intervene. 
The instant he stops fighting he is allied 
with the enemy : he is bought up by preju- 
dice or by fatigue. He begins to realize 
the importance of particular visible institu- 
tions, as if their sole value did not come 

149 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

from the fraction of unselfishness they repre- 
sent. He rushes headlong into trade, and 
thenceforth can see his country only as a 
series of trade interests. He gets into some 
church and begins to value its organization, 
or into some party and begins to value its 
past, or into some club and begins to value 
his friends' feelings. The consequence is 
that you may search Christendom and hardly 
find a man who is free. The advance of the 
world, like the improvement of our local 
politics, has always been the work of young 
men. It is done by men before their minds 
have been worn into ruts by particular busi- 
nesses, or their sight shortened by the study 
of near things. What we love in the young 
is not their youth, but their force. The 
energy that runs through them makes them 
sensitive. They feel the importance of 
remote things, and infer the relations of the 
present to the future more truly than their 
elders. They are touched by hints. The 
direct language of humanity is plain and 
native to them. The invisible waves of 
force which do as a matter of fact rule the 
world, using its fictions and its phrases as 
mere transmitting-plates, strike keenly upon 
the heart of the youth, and the vibrations 
of instinctive passion that shake his frame 

150 



CONCLUSION 

are the response of a strong creature to the 
laws of its universe. This unlearned knowl- 
edge of good and evil is like the response of 
the eyes to light or of the tongue to the 
taste of a fruit. It was not indoctrinated ; 
it is a reaction to a stimulus. 

So long as the world shall last, men will 
be writing books in order to explain and 
justify the instincts; inventing theologies 
and ethical codes, and projecting political 
programs to advance and confirm them. 

If you take up some particular matter 
and begin to trace out its consequences 
upon mankind, you find yourself forced 
boldly to embrace the sum of all human 
destiny. We cannot follow out this course 
in detail. We see only tendency; we see 
only influence. Enlarge our horizon as we 
will, we cannot live out the lives of all 
future generations, and thus furnish an 
answer to the first caviller who interrupts 
our argument with a "cui bono." The 
generous impulses of youth represent a 
vision of consequences. They take in more 
of the future at one glance than a philosopher 
can state in a year. 

Certainly, so far as we can follow out the 
threads of influence, the lines seem to con- 
verge. They make a figure and point to a 

151 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

conclusion exactly upon that spot in the fir- 
mament where instinct would place it. If 
philosophy gives us a diagram, the rest of 
life fills it up, and embellishes it with infi- 
nite illustration. The proofs multiply, and 
are hurled in upon us from all quarters of 
life and all provinces of endeavor. The 
anecdotes and fables of the world, its drama, 
its poetry and fiction, its religion and piety, 
its domestic teaching and its monuments 
support this instinct, and describe the same 
figure. Further still, there is not a man 
who does not reveal it in his soul's anatomy: 
so much so that upon every occasion except 
where his interests are touched, he is for 
virtue, and even where they are touched, it 
is only a question of a few degrees more heat 
to dissolve the habits and prejudices of a 
lifetime, and make him take off his coat and 
go into a war or a political campaign. 

A single man, as we see him in one of the 
great modern civilizations, looks like a bit 
of machinery, a cog or a crank or an air- 
brake. The business man is especially me- 
chanical, his functions are so accurate, so 
delimited and specialized. And yet any 
theory that dwells upon these limitations is 
put to shame in five minutes, for the crea- 
ture eats and sheds tears before your eyes. 

152 



CONCLUSION 

All of the reasons for not doing some par- 
ticular act that you think wise to be done, 
turn out to be founded on the idea that this 
man is a driving-wheel, and nothing but a 
driving-wheel. You cannot change him, 
they say, you must take him as he is. I have 
never heard any argument given against the 
wisdom of righteousness, except the exist- 
ence of evil. " It exists, therefore subserve 
it." Is it not clear that evil exists only be- 
cause people subserve it? It has no fixity. 
Withdraw your support and it begins to 
perish. One man says, " Oh, let the world go. 
All the wickedness and unhappiness in it are 
inevitable." Another says, " Some little con- 
cession to present conditions must be made." 
Nothing can be said to justify the second 
man that is not moral support to the first. 
Your concession is always the acknowledg- 
ment of somebody's weakness. Now you 
may make allowances for a man who has 
not come up to the mark; but if you 
make allowances for him beforehand, and 
assume that he is not going to do right, 
you corrupt him. If these things are true, 
then we are absolved from all complicity 
with vice. We need never take a course 
that requires to be explained. We thus get 
rid of a great oppression and can breathe 

153 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

freely. In the language of the old piety, 
Christian's pack falls from his back. That 
pack has, in all ages, been a perversion of 
the conscience, a mistake as to the size of 
the universe. 

We have seen all these ranks and armies 
of humanity pass in review before us, each 
man with his eyes fixed in mesmeric inten- 
sity upon some set of opinions, until he 
grew to be the thing he looked on. These 
opinions of his are all we know of him. 
They are not our own opinions. They often 
appear to us misguided and illusory; yet 
there is always to be found in them the light 
of some benevolence. They are like broken 
mirrors and give back fractions of a larger 
idea. The hope and courage in each of 
these men bless and advance the world ; but 
not in the way that the men themselves 
expect. They seem all to be bent over a 
game of chess, where every move has its 
real significance upon another board which 
they do not see. Each man seems to be 
following some will-o'-the-wisp across a 
landscape at night. No cannon can waken 
these insensate sleepers. And yet they are 
tracing out patterns and geometrical dia- 
grams upon the sward ; they are weaving a 
magical dance that, for all its intricacy, has 

154 



CONCLUSION 

a planetary rhythm, and the sober motion 
of a pendulum. Each individual in this 
unthinkable host gives an instance of the 
same fatality ; first, that he becomes the 
thing he looks on, and second, that he 
accomplishes something that he does not 
understand. 

And both parts of this fatality must hold 
true of ourselves. Certainly, our subjection 
to the thing we look on is almost pitiable. 
We cannot even remember a righteous hatred 
without beginning to take color from the 
thing we hate. Our goodness comes solely 
from thinking on goodness ; our wickedness 
from thinking on wickedness. We too are 
the victims of our own contemplation. 

As for the last half of that fatality, that 
keeps us forever ignorant of the true mean- 
ing of our lives, it is not an absolute igno- 
rance, like our ignorance of how we came to 
exist. It is a qualified ignorance, like our 
ignorance that we have hurt some one's feel- 
ings. The elements of understanding are 
within us : to-morrow the whole matter may 
become clear. The borders of our under- 
standing extend, as we push outward our 
frontier of inquiry. This is both a frontier 
of scepticism, and of faith. It is a bulwark 
of doubt as to the value of our last new 

^S5 



PRACTICAL AGITATION 

formula, and of faith as to the reality behind 
that formula. As we go forward, bringing 
our lives down to date, holding our expe- 
rience at arm's length and examining it 
with a merciless endeavor to wring the truth 
out of it, we do, from day to day, get a 
clearer notion of the actual world, a truer 
idea of our own place in it. This quali- 
fied and modest understanding of life, that 
comes from putting things together that 
seem to go together, is within the power of 
any one. 

And we find this: the more unselfish men 
become, the more sensitive do they become 
in understanding human relations. The 
gambler cannot see that he is giving pain 
to his family ; his self-indulgence has blunted 
his sensibilities. The faith healer knows that 
he is curing a man in a neighboring State ; 
his love for mankind has refined his sensibili- 
ties. Most of us stand somewhere between 
these two extremes in the scale of under- 
standing, and are moving towards one or the 
other. Education, then, is the process by 
which we gradually discover both the real 
nature of the human life about us, and our 
own relation to the whole of it. The process 
is never complete. Even poets and great 
men are in the dark about their own func- 

156 



CONCLUSION 

tion ; but they are less in the dark than the 
rest of us. They speak from a knowledge 
that is greater than ours. They have a won- 
derful power over us; for they help us in 
our struggle to see the world as it is. 



157 



OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



EMERSON ^™°™^^ 



ESSAYS 



12mo. $1.25. 



Emerson. Walt Whitman. A Study 
of Romeo. Michael Angelo's Son- 
nets. Robert Browning. R. L. 
Stevenson. The Fourth 
Canto of the Inferno. 



MR, CHAPMAN brings to bear on his task a rare 
store of critical perception and literary knowl- 
edge, while in his own style there is nothing to be 
found of the obscure or the inflated. The interesting 
part of Mr. Chapman's work is that he has some- 
thing new to say about everything he touches. — The 
Spectator. 



This Essay (Emerson) is the most effective critical 
attempt made in the United States, or I should suppose 
anywhere, to get near the sage of Concord. — Henry 
James. 

We shall hope to come across Mr. Chapman again. 
Few living critics go so straight to the heart of their 
problem, or waste so little time in writing " about it 
and about." — The Academy. 



OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



Causes and Consequences 

12mo. $1.25. 

Politics. Society. Education. 
Democracy. Government. 



NO one can read Mr. Chapman's book without 
finding in it something instructive and sugges- 
tive. The author is an enthusiast for humanity con- 
verted by stress of circumstances into a preacher 
against corruption. His book is a manly appeal to 
the rising generation, for whom it has a message of 
courage and hope sadly wanting nowadays. — The 
Nation. 

This is a brilliant little book. Mr. Chapman wields 
a razor edge of forcible statement, and he is inspired 
by a moral passion that makes his utterance a breath- 
ing, vital thing. — The Academy. 

The author is essentially a critic, clear and incisive, at 
times rather sweeping in his generalities, yet always 
fresh and stimulating. His attack on the corruption of 
American politics is as vigorous a piece of writing as 
one could desire. — The Outlook. 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers 

153.157 Fifth Ave., New York 







&' 






9 






















*9^ 4*^ 



./.:iikr.'^. .v\.--.V .*<il^..V ...^ 




















'<>• ft 






o •* • 












.^^ 







BOO BINDING 

0CT8S 



